The Desperate Hour
Real-time movies are tricky to pull off. It can feel like a gimmick, something done to cover up a flimsy screenplay. Having a skilled director, and a great actor in the lead to follow, helps immeasurably, and “The Desperate Hour” has both in director Phillip Noyce, and star Naomi Watts. They both understand what this film requires, and can deliver what it needs.
Using a school shooting as the narrative element to hang your film on is very tricky business. We’ve seen filmmakers approach it in a variety of manners, from Gus Van Sant (“Elephant”) to Lynne Ramsay (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”) to Fran Kranz (“Mass”). Chris Sparling’s screenplay puts Watts’s Amy Carr in the middle of it, even if she isn’t directly in the line of fire. She’s taken a personal day off work; it is almost a year since her husband died in a car accident. Her son Noah (Colton Gobbo) seems to be taking the day off school, as well. She goes for a jog. While running, she receives calls, and sees police cars passing by. Quite a few cars, actually. A shooting has broken out at her son’s school. From a neighbor, she finds out that he went to school, after all. She’s away from her car, and it’ll take an hour for her to get to the center the police have set up to reunite students and family. When a detective on the scene wants to ask her questions about her son, her anxiety skyrockets.
This is a strong showcase for Watts to play a character with minimal resources- just a phone with a battery dying- while she tries to keep herself composed and focused during an immensely stressful situation. The ebbs and flows in her emotional trajectory during the film are fascinating to watch Watts play as she has to run towards her son, hoping to find a way to catch a ride there as the uncertainty builds. Noyce stays with her the entire time, and makes us believe that the film is moving at a frantic, realistic pace without overdoing it stylistically. Editing and music play an important part here, and they help anchor the emotions Watts is feeling, and the urgency her faces. “The Desperate Hour” gets a bit preachy at the very very end about the issue- not that we don’t deserve it- and it’s ultimately not a deep film, but it manages to hold out attention for its entire 84 minutes. It’s a successful exercise in suspense.
