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  Directed by
  Starring
  Specs
  • Widescreen 2.35:1
  • 16:9 Enhanced
  • Dual Layer (RSDL 34.03)
  Languages
  • English: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  Subtitles
    English - Hearing Impaired
  Extras
  • Additional footage - Brittany Murphy screen test
  • Deleted scenes
  • 2 Audio commentary - Director, Actors
  • Cast/crew biographies
  • 6 Featurette
  • Animated menus
  • Behind the scenes footage
  • 2 Interviews
  • Awards/Nominations
  • Storyboards
  • Outtakes - Dailies

Don't Say a Word

Village Roadshow/Roadshow Entertainment . R4 . COLOR . 109 mins . MA15+ . PAL

  Feature
Contract

It was only a matter of time before Andrew Klavan’s intense page-turner of a novel, Don't Say a Word, was turned into a Hollywood movie. What’s surprising, though, is how long it’s taken. The book was first published nearly ten years ago, and the film rights snapped up not long afterwards; a screenplay was soon doing the rounds of agents and actors. But the producers of this film-to-be had specific intentions - they wanted Michael Douglas to play the lead role. Douglas, though, was busy helping David Fincher kick-start his career in The Game, and as a result it’s taken until now for the movie to be made at all. It’s a rather tortured history for a fairly by-the-numbers thriller - and it’s surprising that the film is so routine when the book on which it’s based was so compelling and incisive.

Dr Nathan Conrad (Douglas) is a very successful psychologist whose professional career more or less comes first, even when his wife Aggie (Famke Janssen) is laid up in bed with her right leg in a cast. On his way home from work, Conrad is side-tracked by a colleague, who begs him to take a look at a patient who’s proven hard to handle. She is Elisabeth Burrows (Brittany Murphy), and she’s spent the past decade in mental institutions for reasons as yet unknown. But soon after Conrad sees Elisabeth for the first time, his daughter Jessie is kidnapped by a gang of hard-boiled crims led by Patrick Koster (Sean Bean). Koster and his crew stole a ten million dollar jewel at the start of the film, and then promptly got ripped off. Now they are holding Conrad’s daughter hostage and blackmailing him into extracting information from the uncooperative and troubled Elisabeth - a six digit number that holds special meaning both for her and for Koster.

Though it’s fairly standard stuff plot-wise, Klavan’s novel was so fascinating because of his characterisations; not only did the reader care about the characters, but they actually felt as though they were getting to know them - particularly Dr Conrad and Elisabeth - and going on the journey with them. The story unravelled with an almost palpable sense of impending doom, and though often over-the-top it never strayed into silliness. This film version is, however, a different prospect altogether.

The screenplay is credited to Patrick Smith Kelly of A Perfect Murder fame along with newcomer Anthony Peckham; it’s been through many rewrites, and that shows all too clearly at times. Generally respectful of the novel’s basic themes, the script manages to completely bypass the darker emotions that lay under the surface of Klavan’s story. There’s nothing especially unusual about that, of course - most novels lose big chunks of their emotional core in the translation to the screen - but without a real connection to the characters all we’re left with is a stylishly made but curiously empty standard-issue Hollywood thriller.

Despite only ever seeming to play the one character no matter what film he’s in, Michael Douglas does manage to bring his usual presence to the lead role, and he’s very watchable. But he never seems able to convey the vulnerability that’s a key component of the character of Dr Conrad, the feeling of helplessness and utter desperation that, in the novel, ties in so crucially with Elisabeth’s own mental torment. It’s that connection that binds the two characters together emotionally and makes the story work, and with Douglas playing his usual put-upon-and-pissed-off-businessman role there’s little opportunity for that to happen in the film. It’s a shame, too, as Brittany Murphy does a superb job as Elisabeth, quite obviously throwing some of the darker parts of herself into the role and commanding attention for every second she’s on screen; though she’s played a psychiatric patient before (in Girl, Interrupted) she has absolutely no intention of doing the same role again and instead connects with the character she’s supposed to be playing better than anyone else in the film. Famke Janssen never quite clicks as Aggie, Sean Bean digs out the simmering-but-crafty-thug persona that served him so well in Patriot Games, Oliver Platt is good but underutilised as hospital psychologist Dr Louis Sachs and Jennifer Esposito plays an investigative cop with detached efficiency.

At the helm of all this is director Gary Fleder, who impressed a lot of people with his previous films Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead and Kiss the Girls. Here he manages to pull out every thriller cliché in the book and press them into service - though to be fair, his craft is impeccable and his sense of visual style, even in the wide Panavision frame, is refreshingly unpretentious.

Ultimately, Don't Say a Word on film is just not the bundle of tension and fear it tries so hard to be, though it sometimes comes close. Inevitably, it all feels very familiar and of course it’s very Hollywood - which is exactly what the fans expect from their Michael Douglas thrillers.

  Video
Contract

We've come to expect near-perfection from Roadshow discs, and usually get it in the picture quality department. This one's no exception - though in this case, the disc was actually authored by WAMO in the US.

Shot in "real" Panavision - in other words, using anamorphic lenses - Don't Say a Word has been transferred to video at the correct 2.35:1 aspect ratio and is 16:9 enhanced.

Since it uses a fairly muted colour palette for much of its running time (primarily green-biased, though the opening sequence was bleach-bypass processed and is blue-tinged and washed-out as a result), this is a movie that could have looked quite bland on DVD. It doesn't, though - the telecine transfer here is almost impeccable, capturing flesh tones perfectly while not oversaturating backgrounds, particularly in the hospital shots. In scenes when there's a lot of warm light - like at the Conrads' apartment - a lot of use is made of shadow and back-lighting to set the mood, and this also comes across well most of the time. There are a few scenes, though, where black levels were high and shadow detail collapsed; this appeared to be the way the film was intended to look.

The image is crisp and detailed throughout, without any overbearing use of edge enhancement (though there is some at work here).

The layer change appears early on, at the 34 minute mark, at a well chosen location; there's no obvious freezing of on-screen motion thanks to its placement, and it's quickly negotiated.

  Audio
Contract

Being your standard-issue thriller, Don't Say A Word not surprisingly offers a standard-issue Dolby Digital 5.1 sound mix. Extremely well recorded, it delivers the film's dialogue with unfailing accuracy and the unusually quirky Mark Isham music score with plenty of fidelity. Overall, it's a mix that's mainly focussed on the front channels, with only token efforts made to create immersive atmospheres (though a scene early on, in which a bevy of helicopters buzz over a murder scene, is a great way to test your surround speakers!). The rest of the time the most action the surrounds see is from the 5.1-mixed music score.

Like a lot of films in this genre, the LFE track is heavily used, giving a subwoofer kick to just about anything. And we mean anything - the escalating subwoofer use in this soundtrack is actually bordering on the comedic at times. A motorboat buzzes past; "whoosh" may be what you expect to hear, but it's WHOOMP that you get. A door closes. WHOOMP. A gun fires. WHOOMP. A punch makes contact. WHOOMP. A flea hops off a passing puppy. WHOOMP. By the time the movie's whoomp-riddled climax comes around you'd better have made sure you've got understanding neighbours.

With all this bass activity flying around, it's a shame that the DTS audio track included on the US version of this disc is missing here (which probably explains the gigabyte of space left unused on the dual-layered disc despite some very tight bitrate compromises during some of the extras, especially the extremely low audio commentary bitrate).

  Extras
Contract

There's a terrific set of extra features supplied on this DVD of Don't Say A Word, and anyone who's a fan of the film will be delighted by what's on offer. The animated main menu is extremely stylishly done, though the other menu screens are static. The only extra item missing from the US disc is a trailer for the Michael Douglas-equipped film Wall Street, which is of course not one of Roadshow's products in this bit of the world.

Full-Length Commentary - Gary Fleder: Fleder is quite obviously a big film fan himself, and this informative and affable commentary is all the better for it. Very big on technical and practical detail - but not at the expense of information about his inspirations, the creative decisions he took during the film and the actors that help him achieve them - this is terrific stuff. Fleder sounds like the kind of filmmaker you could happily spend a night down at the pub with talking about the nuts and bolts of movies without any danger of boredom. Also fascinating is the timing; the commentary was recorded a month after the September 11th attacks, mere weeks after the film had been re-edited at the eleventh hour to remove shots of the World Trade Center towers. Those shots were all intended to emphasise that the film is set in New York (it was mainly shot in Toronto) and their loss is not damaging to the film (though it would have been nice to see them included in the extras).

Scene-Specific Actor Commentaries: This is an interesting idea; rather than edit together a cast commentary track when it's obvious they can't be in the same place at the same time, the disc producers have instead opted for short, single-scene commentaries - two each from Michael Douglas, Brittany Murphy, Sean Bean, Oliver Platt and Famke Janssen, with the total length coming to just under 41 minutes, more than a third of the movie's running time. These mini-commentaries aren't always as scene-specific as you'd think, and actually tend to be more interesting when they're not; Brittany Murphy's two sections, for example, turn out to be a quick guide to the motivations and philosophy behind her acting - and in her case, that's fascinating. Michael Douglas happily points out, meanwhile, that he doesn't especially like doing extra DVD features. All of the movie clips are presented with the same quality as the main feature, and the same 2.35:1 16:9 enhanced video; audio is Dolby Surround 2.0.

Deleted Scenes: Three deleted scenes that total about three minutes, all taken from the rough-cut tape that's spat out by the editor's computer. As such it's fairly poor-quality video with many dropped frames, letterboxed at 2.35:1 with extensive timecode, reel and scene information below the frame. Needless to say, it's not 16:9 enhanced.

Cinema Master Class: Could it be a university course on a disc? Well, no actually, it's not. Despite the somewhat pretentious title, this section is actually a good solid collection of behind-the-scenes featurettes and other material, just like you'd find on any well-featured DVD. And there's a lot to watch here, too; the total running time of all the video material in this section is 55 minutes, divided into three sections (pre-production, production and post-production) containing three items each. There's fascinating stuff (Brittany Murphy's wrenching original screen test), technical stuff (all nine complete camera takes of a single action scene, and a couple of real-time storyboard-to-scene comparisons), cool stuff (a tour of the sets with production designer Nelson Coates, and an unexpected Mark Isham "music video"), standard behind-the-scenes stuff (in a section oddly titled You Are There), and even unintentionally funny stuff (the "producing workshop with the Kopelsons", which is actually seven minutes of producers Arnold and Anne Kopelson telling us how hard they work and how they're real producers!) "Master Class" it certainly ain't, but if you're interested in learning about key aspects of the creation of this particular film you'll be delighted.

Making-Of Featurette: Seven and a half minutes of hype, done the way only Hollywood can. As your hapless reviewer starts to wonder just how many useful days of his life have been lost to marketing brochures masquerading as "featurettes" like this one (where no matter what film it is, it's always groundbreaking and utterly brilliant in every way), you can have some fun by playing count-the-hyperbole. Still, any hype here pales in comparison to the front-cover quote from Tribune Media Services, tellingly not attributed to any individual journalist: "A thriller to end all thrillers. WOW! A Masterpiece".

Vital Statistics: As you'd probably guessed, this is where they keep the flamboyantly-written biographies (but not filmographies) for the five commentary-providing actors, along with the director and producers.

Dolby Digital Rain Trailer: Someone at Roadshow must seriously love this particular Dolby trailer, because it seems to appear on a good 70% of Roadshow titles that we see. It's all very surroundishly wet and ethereal, but we don't want this one to get as tired as the now-dreaded City noisefest. Bring back the Egypt trailer, we say (and Dolby, it's about time you made some new ones!) For some reason this trailer, which plays right before the movie, is not skippable. Tsk.

Roadshow Press Play Trailer: Yes, it does sound a lot more impressive in 5.1 surround than it did on the telly, though the logic of trying to sell the benefits of DVD to an audience watching on DVD is still beyond us. This plays after the Roadshow logo at the top of the disc, and can be skipped with the Menu button.

  Overall  
Contract

A twists-and-turns thriller that doesn't actually have many twists or turns in it, Don't Say a Word will probably appeal more to devotees of the big-budget mainstream thriller genre than it will to fans of the book on which it's based. It's very well made, though, visually rich and generally extremely well acted.

It's no surprise that Roadshow's DVD contains exactly the same extra features as 20th Century Fox's US version; both appear to have been mastered by the same company. Though missing a DTS soundtrack, this DVD of Don't Say a Word is still excellent value for fans of the film, with very good picture quality, detailed and speaker-challenging sound and a generous supply of extras.


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      And I quote...
    "...not the bundle of tension and fear it tries so hard to be..."
    - Anthony Horan
      Review Equipment
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          Sony DVP-NS300
    • TV:
          Panasonic - The One
    • Receiver:
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    • Speakers:
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    • Centre Speaker:
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    • Video Cables:
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