I remember seeing the trailers for The Woman in the Window back when I still regularly went to the movies. Sure, it was an obvious Rear Window knock-off, but it sure did look impressive. Amy Adams is my favorite working actress today. Gary Oldman and Julianne Moore are also pretty solid in just about everything. Toss in a few other familiar faces and something like this could be as cool as the trailers made it look. True, it’s a trailer’s job to make something look good, but the cast was impressive enough. Then factor in acclaimed director Joe Wright was behind the camera while award-winning playwright Tracy Letts wrote the screenplay, and it sure does sound like something that should be quite a treat.
Then I saw the damn movie on Netflix.
Yeah, I don’t know what happened here, but there’s this unwritten rule in filmmaking that you should, as much as possible, avoid referencing superior movies within your own so that your audience won’t stop to think they could be watching that instead, and within a minute or so, I spotted Adams’s Dr. Anna Fox apparently letting Rear Window play while she slept. I suppose I could give the movie credit for acknowledging that yes, this is something of a Rear Window remake, but see above.
Regardless, Anna Fox has severe agoraphobia. It’s a little weird since it seems like she doesn’t mind letting strangers into her house, but she spends most of her alone time terrified of all kinds of things going on around her. When new neighbors move in across the street, she first meets the teenage son Ethan Russell (Fred Hechinger) and later his mother Jane (Moore). But then Anna thinks she sees Jane being violently murdered across the street and calls the police. Small problem: Ethan’s father Alistair (Oldman) insists that Anna never met his wife, going so far as to have another woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) step forward to say she is Jane Russell, and whoever Anna saw was neither Alistair’s wife nor Ethan’s mother. The only possible corroborator to Anna’s story is her basement tenet David (Wyatt Russell), but he didn’t see anything. Also, it seems some of the medication Anna takes may cause halicinations.
OK, as set-ups go, that isn’t bad. There’s enough ambiguity established early on to make Anna appear to be seeing things. Her own actions in trying to get to the truth don’t make her look any saner or anything along those lines. And part of the Rear Window story is that the witness has trouble getting proof since he or she is confined to a small space away from the scene of the potential crime. So, really, what went wrong?
I can point to any number of things. Adams seems almost cartoonishly hysterical at times, going up a few notches more than felt necessary. Even worse was Oldman, delivering the most over-the-top performance I think I’ve seen from him since The Fifth Element, only there it fit the tone the movie was going for. Moments of revelation from different characters that might have been cool are undercut by Wright’s directorial decisions, splattering images across the screen or in the background in ways that make the movie more laughable when it is clearly shooting for the opposite. Obviously this was done to show how the inner workings of Anna’s mind was processing what was going on, but the end result knocked me out of what was already shaping up to be a somewhat mediocre movie. Maybe if Wright had played it straight, the actors had been a bit more subdued in their performances, and the movie aimed to be closer to Hitchcock than whatever this was, it could have worked. Instead, it went for something very different and ended up as something very bad.
Grade: F
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