Review: Civic Duty

A downmarket Rear Window for the post-9/11 world, Civic Duty places Six Feet Under star Peter Krause in the Jimmy Stewart role, only instead of being laid up with a broken leg he's an emotional cripple, stuck at home because he keeps getting fired from his accounting jobs for unexplained but suspicious reasons and vulnerable enough to the 'stay vigiliant' burblings of the nightly news that he starts to pay regular attention to the activities of his neighbor -- "the middle-eastern guy." Why does this middle-eastern guy insist on using a nearby payphone to make calls even though he carries a cell phone with him? Why does he wait until three in the morning to take his garbage out? These and other questions weigh on the mind of Terry Allen (Krause) and cause predictable problems with his wife Marla (Kari Matchett.) When a healthy impulse eventually kicks in -- to simply go knock on the neighbor's door and voice his concerns -- things get worse instead of better and Allen begins to suspect he's stumbled onto an actual terrorist plot.

Krause is a good choice to play the paranoid straight-arrow Allen, with his ability to lace every word of dialogue with a hint of sarcasm and a 'smarter-than-thou' tone. In all of his roles, he seems perpetually on the verge of a mid-life crisis that will have a body count, and Civic Duty is a good venue for him to play around with that and flex those acting muscles. In order for this character to get from A to Z we have to believe that he wouldn't be receptive to advice from his long-suffering wife or even the increasingly alarmed FBI, to whom he places hushed calls at a regular interval, trying to enlist them in his campaign to stop whatever is going to happen before it happens. Allen even manages to get himself a regular FBI contact, played by The West Wing's Richard Schiff, but as his decisions become more and more rash, it starts to seem like Schiff's character has been assigned not to keep tabs on the possible terrorist, but Allen.

Whether or not you're on board with where the film eventually takes you, there are some clever issues raised along the way, including this one: what's an FBI agent to do when a citizen insists on offering up evidence of a possible ongoing terrorist plot, but also divulges that he's already taken action on his own to the point of breaking into the suspect's home to do a self-styled investigation? What the film suggests is that a typical agent wouldn't touch something like this with a ten foot pole, even if he could be reasonably sure that there might be some fire behind all of the smoke. It also suggests that the entire notion of citizen action is more or less irrelevant and unnecessary when it comes to spotting terrorist activity, since that kind of action is almost inevitably going to rub up against the civil liberties of the alleged terrorist. It's hard to say more without discussing the film's pointed ending, but this is undoubtedly a frustration that director Jeff Renfroe has done some thinking about.

In their supporting roles, Kari Matchett as Marla and Egyptian actor Khaled Abol Naga as Hassan, the suspect-neighbor both do some good work. Instead of simply bouncing off of Krause's character and his paranoia, they each exhibit some concern for his welfare -- although when Hassan actually brings up Marla in conversation with Allen, that doesn't exactly help matters.Naga also does a good job of keeping his cards close to the vest in terms of whether or not his character is innocent or guilty. When he becomes cooperative, understanding and receptive to Allen's concerns, is he revealing himself to simply be an average citizen or is he actually a terrorist who is afraid that somehow this guy has picked up his scent and now is trying to manipulate him off the trail? There's one memorable moment when, during a confrontation in Hassan's home, Allen picks up sone of the suspicious chemical beakers lying around and asks Hassan what would happen if he were to put one of them directly on the stove, with the burner on.

The film, despite being at its heart a minor genre effort that latches onto a big issue for effect, still manages to keep us engaged with relatively tight scripting and actors who are committed to putting on a good show. Some will scoff at the ending and read it through a political spectrum, but I think dramatically it works just fine. There's no statement being made here that I can read, just a story being told. Civic Duty isn't mean to be a serious treatise on the post-9/11 world, just a crafty little thriller that is tasked with keeping us awake in our seats for a little under two hours -- something that many movies find to be an impossible task lately. It all comes back to Krause, who shows here once again that he's an engaging actor who can do the 'vulnerable and volatile stuffed suit' thing as good as anyone out there. Now that he's done it enough times in his career, it would be interesting to see him get offered some different and more challenging roles.