Phone booth is a film about our relationship with our super-ego. In the main we can forget about him, but as we con people and try to cheat on our wives, there comes a time when can feel someone is observing us, someone is listening.
Phone booth takes place almost entirely in a phone booth where the hero argues with his concience made real, and armed with a sniper rifle. But pehapp we are all always in that phone booth, and we feel that there is some "super addressee" who listens in on our phonecalls and even our thoughts, who is with us all the time.
When we are in touch with ourselves we would not even attempt to do something to annoy the best part of ourselves. But sometimes, we have issues and desires that are strong enough to cause a disconnection so that we cannot hear, or feel what our superaddressee thinks of our behaviour. Often this disconnection can continue for a very long time but occasionally, sometimes on a couch, sometimes at the point of death, we are brought back in touch with the view of the internalised other. It is this moment that Phone Booth is effective in portraying. And, as it should be, the hero comes back to his senses, apologises to his wife and the world and weeps.
This is quite a straightforward film. There are few surprises, but it alegorises the structure of our mental life very well. It will leave you feeling more moral and inclided to say "thank you" to your spouse.
Joel the director gave us Flatliners in which medical students edited visual experiences from their lives, and then reexperienced the edits at the point of death. Flatliners allegorises the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness in the visual field. Phone Booth is set securely in the symbolic. While I am rather fond of Keifer Sutherland, I don't think that he should have appeared in the film at all.
I guess it was the demand of the actor, who probably has not yet gotten over his dad.