By Andrew Sarris

February 4, 2001 | 7:00 p.m

Henry Bromell's Panic ,

from his own screenplay, is so much better than its plot sounds that it takes its place as one of the revelatory viewing experiences of the new year. Alex (William H. Macy) is a hit man with a midlife crisis so acute that he goes to a shrink for relief. Sound a bit like Analyze This with a subplot of The Sopranos thrown in? It's not. For one thing, the distinctively chiseled look of the movie is thoroughly original. For another, the characters are driven deeper and deeper into their hitherto repressed psyches until they explode with epiphanies of feeling. What makes Alex an unusually Freudian hit man is his intense relationship with his domineering father, Michael (Donald Sutherland). It was his father who trained Alex to kill squirrels when he was little, and as Alex grew up under his father's tutelage, he learned to kill people cleanly and efficiently. Though he is married with a child, Alex is not allowed by his father to reveal what the "family business" really is to his wife, Martha (Tracey Ullman), and his 6-year-old boy, Sammy (David Dorfman). Yet his mother, Deidre (Barbara Bain), knows all the family secrets and enjoys all the perks the family enjoys thanks to the contract-killing fees. One comparatively unexplored element of the narrative is the minuscule mail-order business Alex pretends is the sole source of his income. By neglecting this fount of easy satiric laughs, Mr. Bromell shows that he is after bigger game and deeper drama. When Alex confides in his mother about his visit to a shrink, he pleads with her not to tell his father-which she immediately does, with a maddening indifference to her son's painful vulnerability to his father's hectoring and bullying. The plot thickens considerably when Alex's father gives him a new assignment, and it turns out to be his shrink. Alex understandably drags his feet, despite his father's constant teasing. Not only has Alex become attached to Dr. Josh (John Ritter) and his probing insights, he has also found relief from his troublesome family in Sarah (Neve Campbell), a troublesome analysand he met in the waiting room. Despite his helpless infatuation with Sarah, Alex finds he cannot leave his wife and little boy, with whom he has one of those magically mature relationships one finds on the screen more and more often these days. The level of child acting and child affect has risen to stratospheric levels in recent years, and Panic is no exception. Indeed, Mr. Bromell constructs his shattering climax around Alex's horrified discovery that his father has taken Sammy out for an instructive lesson on killing squirrels. What finally happens to the characters in Panic is gently moving and ironic, but nothing seems forced or contrived. A noted writer of fiction and quality television dramas, Mr. Bromell displays a gift for building characters from the inside out, so that everything they do, however bizarre, seems consistent with who and what they are. Yet I never knew what was going to happen next, and that is the mark of a masterful screen storyteller. Mr. Macy and Mr. Sutherland have never been more effectively wedded to their roles. See it. Million-Dollar Mistake The creative credits for The Million Dollar Hotel are curiously intermingled with the numerous producer credits. Hence, veteran German cutting-edge director Wim Wenders is billed as the director-producer, Nicholas Klein as the screenwriter-producer and rock star Bono as the co-producer and also the story's co-creator. Bruce Davey and Deepak Nayar are merely producers, and Ulrich Felsberg is aboard as an executive producer. This multiplicity of credits is not unusual in this age of endless vanities, but seldom (if ever) has a broth with so many cooks, and a cast so full of real and virtual celebrities, spoiled into a concoction as excruciatingly bad as The Million Dollar Hotel . The only mystery is how a superstar like Mel Gibson allowed himself to be enmeshed in such a pseudo-avant-garde mishmash. I must acknowledge at this point that I have never been an admirer of Mr. Wenders' elaborate exercises in faux-naïf sentimentality, through which love and friendship seek to find fruition in a corrupt and uncaring world. But in the past I could appreciate at least the shrewd crowd-pleasing competence of Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). Mr. Wenders has been making movies since 1970, and one must thereby concede him the virtues of sincerity and persistence. But the duration and durability of his career are no excuse for the total disaster of The Million Dollar Hotel . The plot, such as it is, concerns a murder investigation conducted by initially robotic Agent Skinner (Mel Gibson), hampered conspicuously by a neck brace. The alleged murder of a junkie (Tim Roth) occurred on the roof of the Million Dollar Hotel, from which the junkie jumped or was pushed to his death. Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies), the junkie's roommate, is one of the prime suspects, the leading character, the random narrator and, in short, the poltergeist of the piece, but Mr. Davies gives one of the most ill-advised performances that I have ever seen or heard in English-language entertainment. He just goes on and on, twitching, grimacing, contorting and making animal sounds and gestures that are his and his alone. Tom Tom has a fitful romance going on with Eloise (Milla Jovovich), who is clinically disturbed-but next to Tom Tom, she appears to be the soul of sanity and lucidity. Among the other delusional occupants of the hotel are Geronimo (Jimmy Smits), a suspiciously nihilistic Native American "painter" who simply smears black tar over paintings he has stolen; Dixie (Peter Stormare), a Beatles fanatic who insists he wrote many of their songs and never got credit for it; and Vivien (Amanda Plummer), a pushy would-be femme fatale claiming that the dead junkie wanted to marry her. There is nothing new about the ironic idea underlying the film's structure, which is simply that the people inside the asylum are less crazed than the supposedly "normal" people outside. This stuff was very chic back in the 60's, but it is a very tired conceit in the new millennium. But the concept is not primarily what is at fault with the movie, but rather the confused and chaotic execution. At times it seems as though Mr. Wenders has become obsessed with his real-life locale, a seedy hotel now known as the Frontier Hotel, with its old Million Dollar Hotel logos still emblazoned on the roof. The problem is that the characters drown in the allegorical flow of the imagery, and nothing can revive them. It is best to pretend that this film never happened, and its performers, including those mentioned above, can hope that nobody saw it. Ullmann's Swipe at Adultery Liv Ullmann's Faithless , from a screenplay by Ingmar Bergman, reminds us that Mr. Bergman launched his film career in 1944 as a screenwriter for Alf Sjöberg's Torment ( Hets in Sweden). Mr. Bergman was then only 26 years old, but the metaphysical morbidity of his career was already in place. Now Mr. Bergman is close to 83, and two of his three recent screenplays have been directed by Ms. Ullmann, his ex-lover and one of the most luminous actresses in his gallery of beauties. Indeed, if anyone were emotionally and spiritually qualified to direct the master's winter tale of his own turbulent married life, it would be Ms. Ullmann. Erland Josephson, another recent Bergman regular, plays an aging screenwriter and director (Bergman himself) who conjures up memories of the characters in his ongoing family saga. The events unfold with a new generation of Swedish performers, most prominently Lena Endre, who serves as Marianne Vogler, Bergman the character's Muse of Memory. Marianne is a successful actress happily married to Markus (Thomas Hanzon), an orchestra conductor much in demand for overseas concerts, and devoted to her young, affectionate daughter, Isabelle (Michelle Gylemo). But is the marriage so perfect? Apparently not, since Marianne almost absent-mindedly drifts into an affair with family friend David (Krister Henriksson), a film director (conceivably an earlier version of Mr. Bergman) notorious for his tendency to enter into unstable, neurotic relationships. Ms. Ullmann and Mr. Bergman seem to be saying something about the pitfalls of married life in the artistic community. In previous films dealing with the marital woes of Mr. Bergman's parents in the shadow of the Church, the emphasis was on the penalties accruing from the stifling repressiveness of religion. But in Faithless , the comparative license accorded artists in their bohemian frolics and carefree work schedules creates its own obstacles to commitment and fidelity. One wonders if Mr. Bergman would have made Marianne more sympathetic than Ms. Ullmann does if he had directed Faithless himself. As it is, Ms. Ullmann brings Isabelle, the pain-ridden daughter, front and center, in mute judgment of her frivolous and irresponsible mother. Nonetheless, the Ullmann-Bergman collaboration extends the mortal chain of the Ingmarian universe to present times. There is nothing casual or even pleasurable about adultery here. If anything, it is a little ridiculous at some moments, and piercingly painful at others. There is always a price to pay, and yet there is never a suggestion that any other course of action would be more fruitful. Suffering of one kind or another is inevitable given the inexorably ticking clock to eternity. See and enjoy, as we have done for so long with the Nordic Pirates of Pessimism.