Civic Duty (DVD)

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September 11th brought out the best in people . . . and the worst. On the negative side, frustrated and panicked Americans began to discriminate against (and in many cases, persecute) anyone who fit the "terrorist profile"--that is, anyone who looked Middle Eastern, and that included a lot of Indians and sub-continental others as well. Hate crimes against those ethnic groups spiked, as normally sane people began to see suspicious activity all around them, their paranoia fueled by Homeland Security's color-code alerts.

"Civic Duty" tries to put a face on those negative reactions, to create a microcosm that could dramatize both the emotional climate of post-9/11 and the extent to which some people felt driven to commit what amounted to hate crimes . . . all in the name of "national security."

That's a noble and socially relevant goal for a film. Unfortunately, from the moment we're introduced to a shell-shocked and ready-to-snap Terry Allen (Peter Krause, "Six Feet Under"), we can see he's got serious problems that have nothing to do with September 11th or any of the background TV yellow-level noise that plays throughout the movie. From the git-go he seems more like the character Michael Douglas played in "Falling Down," who also goes ballistic after losing his job, and also seems to have a tentative relationship with his wife that's a contributing factor. But just about the time you begin to think maybe that's writer Andrew Joiner's point--that it was people with personal problems who committed these hate crimes--the film pulls a 180, and the logic that's supposed to hold everything up starts to buckle like poorly designed scaffolding.

Director Jeff Renfroe also pushes a few too many buttons and pulls a few too many levers to create a visual style that would suggest the screwed-up way Allen sees the world around him. It's as if he used every trick in the cinematographer's playbook:

• sped-up sequences
• multiple exposures
* stop-motion/skip-printing sequences
* slow motion
* blurry-to-sharp focus
* sharp-to-blurry
* tilted and hand-held cameras
* extreme close-ups
* extreme cropping
* sound-video disconnect
* overhead shots
* up-angle shots
* rotating (180-degree) shots
* exaggerated sound effects (thrown phone sounds like a bomb)
* time-lapse photography

Put that all together and combine it with an apparently deliberate graininess and it's just too much--too heavy-handed and self-conscious, to the point where we start to notice the "tricks" in and of themselves, rather than point-of-view devices.

That's too bad, because the script, though no world-beater, is workmanlike and the performances strong. Krause does a fine job of capturing the volcanic temperament of someone behaving with exaggerated calmness because he could blow at any moment. Richard Schiff ("The West Wing") also does a fine job as FBI agent Tom Hilary, whom Krause calls to report his worst nightmare: a Middle Eastern man (Khaled Abol Naga) who moves into an apartment next door. The mentally unstable Allen, who, without a job finds himself with about as much time on his hands as if he were confined by a broken leg, watches from his apartment window as the "terrorist" moves in with (he thinks) surprisingly little baggage, takes his trash to the dumpster at three in the morning, consorts with other Middle Easterners, receives boxes at his door, and has what looks like a meth lab in his apartment. How does he know? Unlike Hitchcock's paranoid protagonist in "Rear Window," Allen is mobile, and enters his neighbor's apartment after the door gives way as he knocks.