FILM

"The Glass House" (One Star)

By Cole Smithey

If the summer of 2001 seemed like an all-time low for Hollywood movies, "The
Glass House" is a perfect whimpering bookend of a teen thriller to polish off the season. Humorless and deprived of the genre's signature shock surprises and suspense, "The Glass House" is by turns a tame and literal thriller about two siblings handed over to conniving amoral guardians after the death of their parents in a suspicious car accident.

Leelee Sobieski ("A Soldier's Daughter") plays Ruby Baker, an impossibly mature 16-year-old who shepherds her little brother Rhett (Trevor Morgan) away from the threat of their adult hosts, played perfunctorily by Stellan Skarsgard ("Breaking The Waves") and Diane Lane ("A Walk On The Moon").

Director Daniel Sackeim apes the movie's glass image system so much that the film seems more of an artistic display of watery transparent images than a narrative package. Even the guardians' last name is Glass, making the detail all the more redundant.

The orphaned children of a public radio producer have $4 million in a trust fund that baits the criminal lengths that the Glasses go to in bringing Ruby and Rhett into their freshly acquired Malibu home. Although we're told that the Glasses were neighbors and friends of the recently deceased parents, none of the film's opening scenes evinces any relationship between the middle-class Baker family to the upwardly mobile Glass couple. Rather the movie concerns itself with slightly intrusive moralizing about
teen risk issues. The dangers of video games, plagiarism, unsupervised swimming, driving, drug use, alcoholism, money borrowing, and statutory rape are touched on in such short shrift order that it's like watching a tennis match with a different color ball popping up in every rally. The movie errs on the side of propaganda to such a ridiculous level that it could become mandatory viewing in certain junior high schools across the country.

There's never any doubt that Ruby isn't smarter than her captors, but she exhibits a lacking academic enthusiasm that's somehow linked to the root of her problems. When Ruby awakens to find that Terry Glass (Skarsgard) has intervened on her homework assignment to write an entire essay about Hamlet while she slept, she dutifully thanks him and turns in the paper at school. It's a silly character-breaking moment that points up the pedantic nature of the script and makes Ruby seem less than scrupulous herself.

Visually, the movie wastes no opportunity to shoot characters from behind all angles and types of glass walls. In the movie's most contrived scene, Ruby visits Terry at his office in a limousine service that he owns. While eavesdropping on a meeting Terry has with a couple of nasty loan sharks, Ruby is treated to a comical view of Terry's face mashed up against a textured glass office wall while his creditors teach him a lesson in brutality. That this happens just before Ruby identifies her parents' Saab through the
company's observation window overlooking the garage is so much water to the ocean.

The most frustrating aspect of "The Glass House" is the way the movie, not only squanders accomplished actors like Stellan Skarsgard, Diane Lane, and Bruce Dern but, insults the audience through their efforts. You keep hoping for someone to resort to a bit of scene stealing to shake the movie out of its mechanical series of disappointments but it never happens.

("The Glass House is playing at Elmwood Plaza 8, Meredian Outer 6 and Celebration! Cinema.)