Gyllenhaal ‘guilty’ of commanding performance
Print Edition
AN emergency dispatch center doesn’t exactly sound like the most visually exciting place to set an entire film. But the technical limitations of being imprisoned in a soulless office while high-stakes action takes place off screen can be an inspired storytelling gimmick in the right hands, as it is in “ The Guilty,” directed by Antoine Fuqua, written by Nic Pizzolatto and starring Jake Gyllenhaal.
A remake of a 2018 Danish film by the same name, Fuqua’s “The Guilty” puts the audience in a Los Angeles 911 call center in the middle of the night as Gyllenhaal’s character — disgraced police officer Joe Baylor — fields emergency calls from around the city. Joe probably isn’t the calmest man in the world under normal circumstances, but take into account he’s doing one of the most stressful jobs in the world while also awaiting a major trial the next day, and you can start to appreciate why he’s so extremely tense.
He’s a little distracted when we initially meet him. Joe’s a field guy relegated to office work, for one, and he’s getting calls that likely aren’t emergencies: A guy robbed by the sex worker he hired; another having a bad episode on drugs. It’s worth hanging around for the credits to peek at all the famous names providing the voices on the other end of the line (Riley Keough, Paul Dano, Ethan Hawke, Bill Burr and Da’Vine Joy Randolph are just a few of the people he speaks to over the course of the night).
But he snaps into focus when he sniffs out a real crisis in the form of a woman’s crying voice. He pieces together that she’s been abducted and feigning a call to her young daughter at home. The situation becomes his obsession for the rest of the film, as he tries to give the police enough information to track a vehicle of which he doesn’t know the make, model or license plate number, speeding down a Los Angeles freeway amid an emergency wildfire situation.
Fuqua adds massive screens to the 911 control room showing Los Angeles burning in real time, which adds visual tension and reminds the audience why all the emergency services in the city are unable to help with this one abducted woman as much as Joe would like. It’s an agonizing experience as a viewer to see the ways our systems can fail those in a true emergency. The dispatchers have to assume the roles of messenger, therapist and customer service representative through it all.
One can hardly imagine a better modern trio of gritty Los Angeles chroniclers than Fuqua, Pizzolatto and Gyllenhaal all working together.
And Gyllenhaal is absolutely commanding throughout the lean 91-minute run time, a compelling ball of stress, anxiety and frustration working only with computer screens, phones and disembodied voices. It’s no understatement that the success of “The Guilty” rests entirely on his shoulders.
The plot has many twists and stomach-turning revelations that keeps viewers in a similar state of stress. You have to occasionally remind yourself not to let your imagination go too far picturing the nightmare that’s happening outside.
Underneath the tick tock of the present crisis is the gnawing suspicion that our protagonist may not be a good man himself. Yes, he probably doesn’t have the disposition for a call center job and regularly snaps at his co-workers, but something has happened that’s made him estranged from his wife and young daughter. Best of all? Fuqua knows he’s up against the clock with this experiment, and gets out in the nick of time.
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