LEELEEOGRAPHY +NEVER BEEN KISSED +HERE ON EARTH +JOY RIDE +MY FIRST MISTER

In The Glass House, the legal guardians of an orphaned teenage girl and her little brother turn out to be Gomez and Morticia (actually, that's giving them too much credit). The trouble with this set-up is that it has the pretence of a moral but revolves around a character who hasn't done anything to place herself in her precarious situation except obey the law and elders; by the time it puts her in the driver's seat (quite literally, as it happens), The Glass House smacks of apology for showing a youth the downs as well as ups of life. The film, like Home Alone or The Rugrats Movie, spreads a false sense of security to its target demographic.

The overexposed Leelee Sobieski stars as Ruby, a poised but rebellious youth whose parents' fatal car accident leaves her and her kid bro Rhett (Trevor Morgan) in the care and custody of the Glasses, Erin (Diane Lane) and Terry (Stellan Skarsgård), an inexplicable couple with a fragile, transparent house to match their name--and the state of their marriage. (One of the film's biggest letdowns is that it lets the bewitching house go to waste; such a D.O.A. metaphor is it that the big showdown takes place far afield of the titular manse, on a mountainous stretch of highway.)

Ruby senses there's something hinky dinky right away, when she's asked to share a bedroom with Rhett; she's worried he'll peek as she undresses. One wonders, if she considers incestual voyeurism a potential enough problem to say it out loud, maybe Erin and Terry's idiosyncrasies are the least of her concerns. Things get worse: it seems that Terry likes to talk on the phone late at night, while Erin, an anaesthesiologist, knows where Ruby can get some killer menstrual cramp medication. Oh, and Rhett comes home one day to find a PlayStation installed.

I don't specifically recall the turning point, but Ruby learns to distrust Terry and Erin further, and Terry, who needs her trust (fund, that is), allows her suspicions to mount; his decision to play cat-and-mouse with her is one of the great mysteries. (I am reminded of the posttrial O.J. Simpson once all but confessing to a reporter: "I didn't kill Nicole, but if I had...") If the filmmakers used Terry's stupidity to strike at tragedy, Hitchcock-style, and not merely to heroize Ruby, they might have wound up with a more original, less offensive final product. In its current state, although Ruby and Rhett must face the death of their parents, they gain the upper hand on the next blows that life deals them; the adult world needs another adolescent empowerment fable like it needs air pollution.

Columbia Tri-Star's DVD version of The Glass House features sterling 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen and fullscreen (1.33:1) transfers on opposite sides of the disc. The latter is a combination of cropped and unmatted as the film was shot in Super35; both were very tastefully mastered. The 5.1 Dolby Digital soundmix cranks up the bass and makes optimum use of the rear channels during a thunderstorm and in the climax, but dialogue is sometimes too whispered for its own good: two eavesdropped conversations necessitated flicking on the subtitles for me.

Director Daniel Sackheim and hack screenwriter Wesley Strick chime in with a feature-length commentary that had me tearing my hair out within five minutes; for starters, Strick refers to Rosemary's Baby as a widescreen picture whose cinematography inspired Sackheim to shoot The Glass House in 2.35:1. (Though overmatted on Paramount's DVD, Rosemary's Baby was framed for 1.66:1 projection.) Strick, who wrote the Cape Fear remake for Martin Scorsese, obviously didn't learn a damn thing from him. Meanwhile, Sackheim praises 2.35:1 by saying, during a boring medium close-up of Chris Noth and nothing else, "You can fit more into the frame"! Other bonuses include a deleted funeral scene (with Strick/Sackheim commentary) that overwhelms anything in the final cut, plus trailers for The Glass House and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and a batch of filmographies.-Bill Chambers