‘Disturbia’ a sometimes-inspired modernization of Hitchcock

What an odd beast, this movie “Disturbia.” Anyone with a rudimentary education in film history can tell you that the setup—a voyeuristic man trapped inside his own home suspects his neighbor of murder—is taken directly from one of Hitchcock’s myriad masterpieces, “Rear Window,” but less mentioned in reviews (perhaps out of fear of ruining the surprises which have stood available for 50-odd years now) is the connection to John Carpenter’s own classic “Halloween.”

As “Disturbia”’s boogeyman dons The Shape’s familiar blue jumpsuit to sneak around the shadows, we are reminded of Carpenter’s movie as a real trailblazer for 30 years of thrillers, made by one of the original film brats of the ‘70s—it’s a film that’s already laden with homage to The Master of Suspense, with half of the characters therein named for characters from “Rear Window” and “Psycho.” The very last line of dialogue in “Disturbia” is “soon to be the number one video on YouTube,” and with an invocation of that modern-day avatar of derivative mixed media, we are forced to wonder how to categorize this film, surrounded by several layers of inspiration and homage, and indeed how to categorize this new generation of filmmaking.

“Disturbia” opens with a ridiculously severe car crash; although there’s an early indication that we start off there in order to give Kale Brecht (Shia LaBeouf) a broken leg à la Jimmy Stewart’s L.B. Jeffries, its real function is to kill off Kale’s father and turn our happy-go-lucky hero into a brooding, angst-ridden young man. An ill-advised comment about dear old dad prompts Kale to punch his Spanish teacher in the face, and one session of juvie court later he’s sentenced to three months under house arrest. It seems like the Life of Riley at first, as it would be for any lazy teenager—but unfortunately, Kale’s mother (Carrie-Anne Moss) cancels his XBox Live and iTunes accounts, leaving a pair of binoculars and local neighborhood drama as the boy’s only form of external entertainment. Though occasionally visited by his Korean-American buddy (Aaron Yoo, subscribing to a rather troubling level of subservient sidekick buffoonery) and a new love interest/sex object next door (Sarah Roemer, who gets the job done, I guess), Kale’s attention soon moves to the stranger across the street, Robert Turner (an intense David Morse), whose rather suspicious behavior leads him to believe that there’s murder afoot.

At its best, “Disturbia” continues Hitch’s tradition in that it places a deep burden on the audience to contemplate their role as filmgoers. “Aren’t we always voyeurs when we go to the movies?” Roger Ebert asked in his “Great Movies” essay on “Rear Window,” likening Jimmy Stewart’s passivity in that film to our own. It’s a scenario soaked with worry, then, to place Kale as the average moviegoer of the 21st century, drawn to the art form as a mere diversion from boredom—and even then only when all other forms of instant gratification (TV, video games, music) have been exhausted. (“That’s 40 gigs of my life that you’ve got right there,” Kale says when his iPod is placed in mortal danger.) He’s been stuck on the sidelines, sending his friends to investigate Turner’s dirty laundry, so his eventual ascension as the avenging angel feels like something purely media-informed, less borne from true heroism than out of the expectation that the protagonist should eventually take action to wipe out the bad guys. As the audience plunking down 10 bucks to see this film, “Disturbia” asks:should we be demanding more than the thoughtless comfort that formula offers us?

But “Disturbia” isn’t always that self-aware as it covers the familiar bases of your average horror film. Truth be told, it only touches on the truly disturbing themes that it introduces—but it also manages some genuine thrills, buried though they may be in a kiddie alt-rock soundtrack and those typical horror synth screams that, 30 years running, still have to accompany every false scare. (David Morse makes for a chilling presence, all right, his smirking menace reminding of Anthony Hopkins when he actually cared about acting.) But in this day and age, so dictated by post-modern irony and hipness-through-indifference, the very attempt to criticize the establishment du jour by example—and the methods of its ideological predecessors—should be lauded. Imagine it: a film that’s got the balls to steal a page from Hitchcock’s book and modernize it, only to turn around and point a finger at the idea of unnecessary modernization. Still, “Disturbia’s” constant slant toward the culture of cool puts the intentionality of it all into question—and besides, how long has it been since you last saw “Rear Window,” anyway?