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2003, Fox
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Screenplay by Larry Cohen
Colin Farrell as Stu Shepard
Kiefer Sutherland as The Caller
Rated R for pervasive language and some violence
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Does art imitate life or life imitate art? Joel Schumacher’s wonderful thriller Phone Booth was originally set to be released in November 2002, but as a result of the terrifying shooting spree by the notorious ‘Washington Sniper’, 20th-Century Fox chose to delay its release.
Colin Farrell, who plays the film’s star, Stu Shepard, described Phone Booth as an exploration of a ‘complex character’s life-and-death struggle for redemption whilst undergoing a terrifying ordeal’. The film raises many serious issues which we can reflect positively on, and which provoke us to think harder about who we are, and who we might become.
Shepard is a man at the very top of his game – or, so he thinks. He’s in his late twenties, with beautiful hair, manicured nails, a Donna Karen suit and silk Armani tie. He’s got the gift of the gab, and struts confidently down Broadway as if he owns the place. He somehow seems to represent so much about our fast-paced and skim-the-surface culture. There’s no depth to his life; no substance to his dealings with other people.
He’s a highly-strung, fast-talking manipulator; a New York publicist who fakes his own success. Stu spends his days pacing the street, hyping himself to clients on his mobile phone and telling them what they want to hear, so that they do exactly what he wants them to. He doesn’t have much use for the truth, which he bends, twists and breaks at every opportunity.
Clip One: Who Do you Think you Are?
Stu and his young assistant Adam are walking down the streets of Manhattan, each speaking into a mobile phone. Stu is persuading ‘Donny’ that he’ll get him the front cover scoop he’s after. “No means yes to these people, Donny” he argues. At the same time, Stu is getting Adam to ring big-name magazines, to play them off against each other, telling each one that the other is going to run a picture of Donny on their cover.
Suddenly, Adam raises the alert – it’s Mario’s restaurant! They always walk quickly past Mario’s, where Stu has been dining out on false promises of publicity for the restaurant for months. But it’s too late. Mario appears on the pavement beside them. Before Mario can finish his complaint (“No more free drinks. No more free meals”), Stu is promising him the biggest celebrity party of the month, to be held at his restaurant with TV coverage and stars… And Mario is thanking him, as if he really believes him.
Stu gives Adam some further instructions about the magazines and sends him off to go and get a suit. And once alone, Stu checks his watch, and sidles up to a phone booth – the same one, in fact, that he approaches at the same time every day. Stu, who’s married to Kelly, always uses this booth in Manhattan to call a pretty, aspiring actress called Pamela who he’s stringing along because he’s attracted to her. In a cell-phone world, it’s one of the last remaining ‘booths’ of its kind in the city, ‘one of the last vestiges of privacy in Manhattan’, as the narrator says. Stu calls Pam from the booth so that his wife, Kelly, doesn’t find her number on his mobile-phone bill. Conveniently, Pam doesn’t know that Stu is married.
As he starts to dial Pam’s number, he fiddles with his wedding ring, and then takes it off. But before he can make the call, a pizza deliveryman appears at the booth, and knocks on the door. The pizza’s for the man occupying the phone booth, he says. But Stu – who is confused by this surprise gesture - is rude, callous, insulting, and instructs him. “Please return to sender” with a final cutting remark about the man’s weight.
He dials Pam, and proceeds to string her along with empty promises of acting parts and press conferences. But when she refuses to come down and meet him at a hotel for the afternoon, his manner changes, and he ends the call. As he picks up the wedding ring, the phone rings. Curious, Stu answers it immediately.
“Isn’t it funny? You hear a phone ringing and it could be anybody. But a ringing phone has to be answered, doesn’t it?”
It’s his judgment call. As the film’s tagline would have it, his life ‘is on the line’.
On the other end is a man’s voice; terrifyingly, it’s a mad sniper who has decided to become Stu’s judge and jury. The man announces to Stu that his time is up, and that, if he values his life, he had better not hang up.
A sign on the wall by the phone booth says, in huge letters, ‘Who do you think you are?’ And for the rest of the film, Stu has no choice but to set upon a course of self-discovery. The voice on the other end seems to know all about his personal life and his myriad lies. He has watched him act without respect to all the people around him.
Judgement Day
During the call, the sniper tries to get Stu to realise that he is “guilty of inhumanity to (his) fellow man” and the “sin of spin – avoidance and deception”. He also explains that he has a high-powered rifle trained on the phone booth from one of the many buildings, and if Stu tries to leave it, he will be killed. His scope is so good that he could find Pam’s number from watching Stu dial it.
And to prove he is deadly serious, he shoots a bystander. Panic breaks out everywhere and the police quickly arrive, assuming that Stu is the killer. They try to force him to put the phone down and come out of the booth. Stu finds himself in a life-and-death struggle, while being forced to re-examine his life and his priorities.
The mystery caller is a self-proclaimed enforcer of morality, who is set on teaching his ‘immoral’ target at any cost. He also warns how he shot two other businessmen who had committed similar ‘sins’ to Stu and who had refused to repent.
This is an avenging angel who manages to stir Stu’s conscience, offering him the opportunity to repent from past mistakes and to start a new way of life. “You have a choice to make things right,” he tells him. The caller then takes Stu through three different phases – of judgement, confession and redemption.
First, he’s forced to acknowledge his wrong doings. The sniper calls several things into question in Stu’s life, such as his self-inflated image.
Stu genuinely believes himself to be at the centre of his world; nothing else matters to him. At first, he thinks the man might be a failed actor in need of his help, and he threatens him: “A lot of people know who I am... You won’t ever get work in this town again… I can turn people into gods and I can turn people into losers…”
The caller highlights his lack of respect for others, which has been clear from the film’s onset. It is also shown most dramatically in his dealings with a pizza deliveryman. Stu has become used to being able to pay people off with money. And as the voice reminds him, “Everyone has their price.”
Another aspect of Stu’s character the voice calls into question is his countless lies. As he later admits, Stu lies to everyone: to the people he works for or with; to his friends; to both Pamela and Kelly; and to his assistant, who he bribes with the empty promise of a pay-cheque he never intends to pay.
It is Stu’s inability to tell the truth that concerns the voice most: “Why don’t you try telling her the truth?” he asks. “You’re in this position because you’re not telling the truth.”
Phone Booth’s director, Joel Schumacher, has said of our society that ‘we accept lying and lying to the most important people in our life and that rules aren’t for us. We are showing the selfishness and decadence of this generation.’
Second, the sniper forces Stu to acknowledge the consequences of his wrong decisions. At first, he cannot understand why this has happened to him and he is told, “If you have to ask, you’re not ready yet.”
Later, the voice intones, “You are guilty and therefore take responsibility. Your sins have been noticed. Life has given you your fair share. Deception can’t go unrewarded.”
It continues, “Your choices still jeopardise other people. When are you going to realise that?” The caller teaches him a lesson when he goes back on his word, telling him: “You can’t know the pain of betrayal until you’ve been betrayed”. Ominously, Stu is told, “Your sins have finally caught up with you.”
Third, Stu is offered redemption as the voice always gives him a way out: “You could confess your sins and beg for absolution,” he reminds him. The voice explains that he is doing “all this to get you to do what is right… I’m offering you a chance to redeem yourself. Humble yourself in front of your loved ones,” he commands. “Tell Kelly about the real Stu.”
Clip Two: Confession Time
Stu is in the phone booth. He’s looking flustered, upset. Nothing like the confident PR man who walked into it minutes earlier to call Pam. “Your sins have finally caught up with you,” says the sniper.
“Tell me what you want!” begs Stu.
“What everyone wants: for the bad guy to get what he’s always deserved.”
Police, following the shooting of the bystander, surrounds him. And there’s a gun in the phone booth, planted by the sniper. Unless Stu confesses ‘everything’ to the watching media, Stu will be forced to pick up the gun, thus provoking the police marksmen to shoot him.
The sniper tells Stu that he’s talking “prime time material, now”. “So no more excuses or half truths… TV seems to bring out the worst in people, so you should be fine.”
Stu is perplexed, though, at this call to confession. What has he done that makes him any worse? He’s just a publicist who fantasises about pretty little actresses; he hides himself behind expensive suits, and doesn’t waste his time being nice to people who aren’t useful to him.
“I know your crimes,” interrupts the sniper. Tell them!”
So, Stu leans out of the booth, and looks at the cameras all lined up, alongside the TV cars and officers and reporters and public. He sees his wife, Kelly. And then he turns and sees Pamela. Both are there, as he begins to list his ‘crimes’:
“I never do anything for anyone unless they can do something for me.”
“I string along an eager kid because he looks up to me.”
“I lie to the magazines, papers and my friends.”
“I feel that I need my expensive clothes, because underneath I feel like the Bronx.”
“My $2,000 watch is a fake and so am I.”
“I should be alone.”
He talks directly to Kelly.
“I’ve been dressing up as something I’m not for so long. I’m so afraid you won’t like what I am underneath. But here I am, I’m just flesh and blood and weakness. I love you so much. I take my ring off [when I talk to Pam] only because it reminds me how I’ve failed you. I don’t want to give you up, but it may not be my choice anymore. You deserve better.”
Stu is distraught. Kelly stares. Pam cries. The world watches.
The Dynamics of True Repentance
Stu becomes a changed man immediately after his confession, when he realises that “I didn’t confess for you” (the sniper). He has seen for himself the value in honesty.
Instead, he realises that his marriage is really worth fighting for. “I neglected the things I should have valued the most,” he admits.
Stu is being forced – however bizarrely - to recognise a spiritual reality that will eventually face us all. ‘For,’ the Bible says (in 2 Corinthians 5.10), ‘we must all stand before Christ to be judged. We will each receive whatever we deserve for the good or evil we have done.’
Obviously repentance cannot be coerced. And neither is God a mad sniper with a long-range rifle. A change of heart must come from within. Still, we should know that a day is coming when we will be held accountable for all that we say or do. Our lives are already like an open book to God, as the Bible says in Matthew 12.3 and Romans 4.10-12.
After his confession, Stu comes out of the phone booth and adopts a crucified position. He is felled by a policeman’s rubber bullet. But then, he experiences new life - a resurrection, if you like - in his wife’s arms, the woman he has come to realise as the most important figure in his life. She forgives him. Heart-felt confession brings new life. The voice warns Stu: “Lets hope that your new-found honesty lasts, because if it doesn’t, you’ll be hearing from me.”
The Example of King David
In the Bible we find a very personal prayer of confession, self-examination and a cry for forgiveness. Psalm 51 is a confession by David, who committed the double sin of adultery and murder while he was king of Israel. David was on his palace roof one day while his army had gone out to battle and he saw a beautiful woman bathing.
His sent messengers and ordered her to be brought to him. He slept with her while her husband, a soldier in his army, was away fighting for his king. Later, when David learned that she was pregnant, he panicked and tried to cover up his actions. He ordered Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, to be sent home from battle, hoping that he would sleep with his wife and the child would then be accepted as his own.
But Uriah was a faithful soldier, committed to battle, and would not go to his own house, but stayed at the palace and returned to the battle the next day. David knew that what he did would be found out, so he ordered Uriah, the husband, to be put in the forefront of the battle where he would most certainly be killed. When news of Uriah’s death reached David he felt he was off the hook, he had safely covered his sin.
But his conscience continued to bother him. In Psalm 32, David describes how he felt during the time he was trying to cover up what he had done. “When I refused to confess my sin, I was weak and miserable, and I groaned all day long,” he writes. For about a year, he tried to live with a guilty conscience. But God loved David too much to let him go on covering up and damaging himself and his entire kingdom by this hidden sin.
So God sent the prophet Nathan to David. And when Nathan confronted the king, he acknowledged the terrible thing he had done. He fell on his face before God, and out of that experience of confession came Psalm 51, with its beautiful line, ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.’
The Need for Cleansing
It reminds me of two students who were chatting. One of them said, “I was given a cookbook for Christmas, but I can never do anything with it.”
“What, too much fancy work in it?” asked the other.
“No,” replied the first. “Every one of the recipes begins the same way: ‘Take a clean dish.’”
Like both King David and Stu Shepard, our lives need cleansing. God says, “Take a clean life,” and that’s a problem, because the Bible tells us that we ‘all fall short of God’s glorious standard’ (Romans 3.23).
In fact, we’re a bit like snowflakes. Their crystal formations are beautiful. Each is unique, with a different shape and size; but they all have one thing in common: they have dirty hearts. In fact, the centre of every snowflake has a formation of dirt, which holds it all together.
Every one of us has a dirty heart. We are the greatest of all Creation, God’s pride and joy, and every single one of us is – amazingly - unique. Yet we all have a common thread: sin. Every one of us is also marked by sin. And sadly, sin is dirty. It’s filthy, and it stains our lives.
We try to deal with our guilt in a lot of different ways. Some people try to cover it up with a lot of good works, thinking, “If I do enough good deeds, I can balance the scales in my favour.” But good deeds won’t, in the end, dispense with our guilt.
Our tendency is to rationalise, explain, excuse, defend or justify our actions.
The great author and scholar CS Lewis once wrote that ‘we have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin, but, mere time does nothing either to the fact or guilt of sin. The guilt is washed out not by time, but by repentance and the blood of Christ.’
Only what God has done for us through the sacrifice Jesus offered on the Cross can take away the sin and the guilt. The Bible says, ‘’The blood of Jesus Christ … cleanses us from all sin’ (I John 1.7). It’s very good news for us, when there is no other way to find forgiveness and redemption.
So, David says, ‘Purge me, purify me, and wash me.’ He says, ‘God, that’s what I want you to do to me. I’ve got myself dirty. I’ve been messing with some things I shouldn’t have been. I need you to clean me up. He describes forgiveness as a cleansing: ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God,’ he writes. ‘Wash me clean from my guilt’ (Psalm 51.2). ‘Purify me from my sins and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow’ (Psalm 51.7).
Contrition before Confession
We can see from the Psalms that before David could be cleansed, God wanted him to be sorry, and even ‘contrite’. ‘The sacrifice you want is a broken spirit. A broken and repentant heart you will not despise,’ David writes in Psalm 51.17.
To be contrite does not mean merely feeling bad or remorseful about sin. It means that we experience a genuine and deep-down sorrow for our actions against God and against others. We must also show a determined desire to be different, unlike the man who wrote a letter to the Inland Revenue saying, ‘I am having trouble sleeping because of my conscience: so please find enclosed £100. If this doesn’t cure my insomnia, I’ll send you the rest.’
That’s not an attitude of contrition! A contrite heart does not seek to blame circumstances or other people or God for our own failure. And in the Biblical account, David doesn’t blame God or Bathsheba. He doesn’t say, “Lord, if you hadn’t made me king I wouldn’t be walking on this palace roof in the first place. And besides, did you see what she wasn’t wearing?”
In Las Vegas, there is a call-in ‘confession line’ which you can ring to confess your sins to a recording. It costs $9 for three minutes to record your sin; but if you want to pay $18, you can listen to other people’s confessions. One of the phone line’s directors has commented: “It’s a technological way to get something off your chest without the embarrassment that comes from confessing one-on-one.” But do you know what it really is (besides a nice little earner for some entrepreneurial spirit)? It’s confession without accountability.
If we ever hope to have a clean heart, we must experience contrition. And then, just as with King David and Stu Sheppard, we must confess what we’ve done. The reason most people don’t find God is the same reason that most criminals don’t find a policeman.
The Two Sides of Confession
There is a part of us that finds it very difficult to go to God and honestly admit doing wrong. In fact, we can be freed by confession or locked in by denial. The choice is ours. It’s been that way since Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden. They tried to hide from God and when that didn’t work they tried to shift some of the blame for their sin on to someone else. And that’s exactly what continues today. We see it throughout our society, whether it’s in politics, sport, education, the BBC...
In Psalm 51 (verses 3-4a), David writes, “For I recognise my shameful deeds - against you, and you alone have I sinned. I have done what is evil in your sight.” There are two sides to his confession. First of all, he confesses to himself. He acknowledges his guilt: “I realise that I have sinned. I can’t deny it or escape it or forget it. I recognise what I’ve done.” Then he confesses his sin to God: “Against you, you only, have I sinned.”
Along with his admission of guilt is a confession of God’s justice, and God’s right to judge him for what he has done. David makes no plea for lenience, no claim that God is being too hard on him, no appeal for a lighter sentence. Simply put, he says, “You’re right, I’m wrong.” Genuine confession demands that we take sin as seriously as God takes it.
It’s not about excusing ourselves; about thinking it’s just a slip-up, a mistake. It’s about us developing the right attitude towards sin; we need to loathe it, to find it disgusting. Just like Stu and the sniper, this is deadly serious. And armed with disgust for sin, we must determine to turn away from our sin. The Bible says, ‘If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleanse us’’ (I John 1.9).
David was contrite and confessed his sins, so God cleansed him. And wonderfully, God is willing to do the same for any of us. We don’t have to be a king. We don’t even have to have committed adultery, or killed a man, to experience the amazing sense of forgiveness, which comes with confession. God delights in having the opportunity to forgive us all, for whatever we have done, whether big or small. And when he forgives, he doesn’t continue to hold it over our heads. Sometimes we have a harder time forgiving ourselves than God does.
We sometimes feel weighed down with the burden of guilt long after God has removed it from our backs. If we follow God’s instructions to be contrite and to confess, we can then trust that God has kept his promise to forgive. Psalm 103 (verse 12) puts it beautifully: ‘As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us.’
Have you asked yourself recently whether you need the cleansing that God offers? Are you covering up the guilt in your life through good works or denial? Or are you labouring under an enormous burden of guilt? Either way (and many of us are somewhere in between), have you received God’s forgiveness? Have you forgiven yourself?
Do you need to let go of your regrets about the past, and experience God’s healing for the previous poor choices you have made?
Like the film, our lives are on the line. And like the film, we need a wake up call, to contrition, confession and redemption. Thankfully, we don’t need a sniper to trap us in a phone booth. This movie will make you think hard enough. But the words of King David, who confessed and experienced forgiveness, will show you where to go next for the source of all life. There is always hope.
