Trust no one in ‘The Woman in the Window’
Several times while watching “The Woman in the Window,” someone would appear on-screen and I would think, wow, she’s in this. And he’s in it, too.
And then wonder, why isn’t this a better movie?
It’s got Amy Adams and Gary Oldman and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Anthony Mackie and Brian Tyree Henry and Julianne Moore — you get the idea. It’s directed by Joe Wright (”Atonement,” “Pride & Prejudice”) and the great Tracy Letts, who also appears in it, wrote the screenplay based on A.J. Finn’s novel.
It’s loaded with
talent,
in
other
words. But the thing about talent is, you have to give it something to do for it to flourish. Otherwise you’ve just got a lot of great actors and writers sitting on the bench watching the frames go by. This is
just a mess, kind of a riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” — an unassailable classic in terms of building suspense while portraying the upside of voyeurism — but so much less.
It knows it, too — a snippet of “Rear Window” shows up early during the film. Might as well acknowledge it up front and move on.
And yet, despite marveling at the many ways in which the movie goes wrong, I kind of want to see it again. There’s something that connects here, at least a little. The caliber of cast helps, certainly. But it’s an interior movie, both literally in that it is set almost entirely inside an apartment, and also figuratively, in that so much of it occurs inside its main character’s head. It doesn’t have pandemic resonance, but it does get at the feeling of being trapped, and wondering about a big world out there somewhere that you no longer have access to.
Amy Adams spies on people, ‘Rear Window’ style
Anna Fox (Adams) is a psychologist with agoraphobia — she hasn’t been outside of her fabulous New York brownstone in 10 months. She’s separated from her husband, Ed (Mackie), and their daughter Olivia (Mariah Bozeman), but they talk on the phone a lot. She spends the rest of her time drinking wine with the medication she’s not supposed to mix with alcohol and watching old movies.
And watching her neighbors out the window. The set design is a direct quote from “Rear Window,” which is fine and kind of funny. Or would be if the story were similarly involving.
Her psychiatrist, Dr. Landy (Letts) — perhaps a sneaky reference if you’re familiar with the Brian Wilson saga — visits for sessions. He’s curious about all the people across the way in the various apartments, whose residents Anna is up on because she can see directly into their windows. (Thankfully for the purposes of filmmaking, “Rear Window” evidently didn’t cause a run on blinds and shutters.)
David (Russell) lives in the apartment in the basement and seems friendly enough, except when he isn’t, a reversal that seems based on whimsy as much as anything. Well, whimsy and Anna’s predilection for barging in on him.
One night Ethan (Fred Hechinger), whose family lives in one of the apartments across the street, arrives bearing a gift from his mother. Working with troubled children is Anna’s specialty, so she and Ethan strike up a conversation. (People can visit Anna. She just can’t go out into the world.)
On Halloween, kids egg the front of Anna’s house. When she tries to go outside to stop them she faints, only to be assisted by Jane (Moore, really good as a free-spirited sort who seems uniquely untrustworthy), Ethan’s mother.
Then Anna, snooping, sees stabbed.
The police don’t believe her. One detective (Henry) seems sympathetic enough. But the other (Jeanine Serralles) is comically dismissive of Anna’s
Jane story and of Anna, while she’s at it.
It doesn’t help Anna’s case that Ethan’s father, Alistair (Oldman) shows up, denying everything — and with his wife Jane with him. Except this Jane (Leigh) is a different person entirely. Alistair rails that Anna is an alcoholic drug addict who can’t be trusted, particularly since some of her medication can cause hallucinations, and Anna doesn’t really have a defense against that. She is an unreliable narrator. Exceptionally unreliable.
Adams, Oldman, Moore and the rest seem to be acting in different movies
You can’t say it mimics “Rear Window” completely. Instead the story takes off in some decidedly odd directions, with Wright providing some unintentionally hilarious visual information that cannot be revealed here but, whew, I can’t wait to talk about it with people who see the movie.
The performances are fine to good — these people are too talented to make a total flop. Adams has the unenviable position of having to embody both the Jimmy Stewart and the Grace Kelly roles for a while. But given Anna’s condition, there’s no possibility of something like the throwaway moment when Kelly, seen through Stewart’s lens as she snoops around, gives him a little wave. OK, that’s perhaps my favorite scene in any movie, ever, so that’s not a fair comparison. Still.
Oldman mostly raves. Leigh doesn’t do much. Henry is warm but firm. Serralles is doing who knows what. Moore and Russell make their characters’ choices seem a little dangerous and thus more interesting.
If it sounds like they’re all acting in different movies, well, that’s the problem.
There is a certain appeal to watching it all fall apart. I could see “The Woman in the Window” becoming a kind of channel-surfing cult classic. But not as long as “Rear Window” is out there somewhere, too.