Jake Gyllenhaal is waiting for your call in Netflix's thriller The Guilty. Streaming now.
Jake Gyllenhaal is waiting for your call in Netflix's thriller The Guilty. Streaming now.
Opinion by Karl Puschmann
Karl Puschmann is Culture and entertainment writer for the New Zealand Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
Our phones are now our constant companions in life. We don't leave the house without them and we spend all day when we're in the house trying to resist the urge to fiddle with them. They hold our dearest memories in their photo app and provide a lifeline tofriends in their message app.
We get our news, shape our views and run our lives through these small handheld devices. But the one thing we go out of our way to avoid doing on these communication devices is actually talk on the bloody things.
Talking on the phone? No. Ain't nobody got time for that.
These days we want to communicate via email or message. We want to schedule all our appointments and bookings online. What we don't want to do is call. Ever.
If there's one thing worse than being on a call it's listening to someone else on a call. Which is why the premise of Netflix's new thriller The Guilty is so galling. No spoilers but let me tell you exactly what happens in the film; Jake Gyllenhaal answers the phone and then spends the next 90 minutes talking on it.
Okay, there's a little more to it than that, but not too much more.
Gyllenhaal stars as Joe, a police officer demoted to answering emergency 911 calls while awaiting trial for an unspecified incident. He's an ass to his phone operator co-workers, who he deems below him, an ass to people who call in with what he deems frivolous emergencies and as ass to the dispatch officers that he regularly connects to.
Jake Gyllenhaal, on duty and on the phone in Netflix's thriller The Guilty. Streaming now.
One day he's waiting out the clock until home time when a call comes in from a distraught woman named Emily. She's been abducted and is being held against her will in a white van that's hooning down the LA freeway. Joe's police officer training kicks in as he instructs her to pretend she's comforting her daughter so her captor doesn't realise she's talking to the police as he presses her for any further details that may help him get the highway patrol to her location quicker.
After a couple of cryptic hints she hangs up, leaving Joe ringing around other departments and old police friends to help him locate her and work the case. Many of these conversations go downhill rapidly because he's an angry man and because most professionals don't like having orders barked at them by someone they don't work with and who is also lower down the chain of command than they are.
As the night ticks on, an increasingly frantic Joe and a progressively distressed Emily play phone tag with each other as he gradually pieces together a picture that involves an ex-crim partner, an abandoned child and a murdered baby.
It's around this time his already poor phone manner spirals rapidly downhill as he spits and sputters and shouts and screams to everyone he speaks with on the phone. Everyone, that is, except Emily who is barely keeping it together bundled up in the back of the van.
Rare scene of Jake Gyllenhaal sans phone in Netflix's thriller The Guilty. Streaming now.
This does all sound rather thrilling, I'll admit. But like being stuck in a "priority queue" when calling your insurance company it becomes tedious quickly because the action, for want of a better word, never leaves Gyllenhaal and his phone. Despite its compact 90-minute run time it feels so much longer.
Yes, it may be one of the most accurate and believable depictions of what life's like in a call centre but that doesn't necessarily make for the most entertaining of movies.
Even with Gyllenhaal's powerhouse acting display there were long stretches where I found myself reaching for my phone. And not because I was so inspired by his performance that I too felt the urge to call someone up for a chat.
Now I know what I'm about to say defeats the whole point of the movie but the biggest problem is that it nukes the golden rule of film; show don't tell.
All this movie shows you is how good an actor Gyllenhaal is. But boy does it tell you about loads of really cool things like house break-ins, dog attacks, high-speed pursuits, grisly awful death and at least one honest-to-goodness kerfuffle.
That's the movie I want to see. Instead I just watched Gyllenhaal furiously furrowing his brow and occasionally exploding into the receiver for an hour-and-a-half.
Like I said, it's a terrific performance of a man on the edge on the phone, and there was enough intrigue there to keep me on the line to the end.
But much like a phone call you run through the house to answer, it really is a movie I could've missed.
