The Woman in the Window (2021)
Directed by Joe Wright; screenplay by Tracy Letts (then rewritten by Tony Gilroy) based on the book of the same name by A.J. Finn; starring Amy Adams, Anthony Mackie and Julianne Moore.
1/5
Throughout The Woman in the Window, Amy Adams’ agoraphobic child psychologist Anna is frequently lulled off to bed by old mystery films and thrillers playing on an absolutely massive plasma TV. Plastered across the screen come the ghosts of old Hollywood, Jim Stewart in particular, at times entirely consuming the frame. It’s obvious what it’s trying to do, but for me these moments really help sum up what’s wrong with the project – ignoring the chaos (more on this) behind the scenes and focussing on the film itself. It’s garish, unsubtle and constantly reminding us of what the film wants to be but simply isn’t.
Anna lives out her days in a Manhattan apartment, never venturing outside for her illness and spending probably too much time pouring over what few details she can glean from her window of the lives of her various neighbours. Across the way, the Russells have just moved in. There’s Alistair (a silver-haired Gary Oldman), the violent-tempered, probably abusive father. You have Ethan (Fred Hechinger , a slightly off-putting but vulnerable teen on the precipice of his sixteenth birthday. Of particular note, though, is Jane (Julianne Moore), the unbalanced matriarch, with whom Anna starts to build a friendship (though it’s a little hard to tell since everyone communicates a bit like an alien.) One night, she spies Jane very clearly being abused across the way and when her new friend is suddenly and violently murdered, Anna takes it upon herself to piece things together.
And piled atop this already overly-complex rehashing of Rear Window are so many moving parts that the whole thing starts to become less Hitchockian and more unhinged conspiracy theory.
Only ever on the other end of a phone call is Anna’s husband, Ed, (Anthony Mackie), with whom she is separated, providing Anna with often unhelpful and clearly frustrated commentary on the day’s events. The separated couple also have a daughter (Mariah Bozeman), who lives with Ed, and soon it becomes apparent that Anna herself might be hiding some dark secret relating to her never-appearing family.
Add to this the shady tenant (Wyatt Russell) living in Anna’s basement, a couple of rather incompetent police officers (Brian Tyree Henry and Jeanine Serralles), an interminably disagreeable psychiatrist (Tracy Letts, also the film’s screenwriter) and the purposefully disorienting state of Anna’s mind, and it soon becomes a wonder to me that anyone could make sense of what’s going on here, let alone enjoy it. It’s the type of film that lives purely on the basis that the culmination of all these disparate elements is satisfying, makes sense and sheds some new light on those involved – but none of these things really happens.
Tracy Letts’ attempts to evoke human language are frequently surrealistic in a way that simply cannot be intended. It’s clear that the issues probably arise from the fact that Letts is attempting to load every sentence with just enough information to make what’s coming later make sense, but it doesn’t really get him off the hook – the breadcrumbs leading us through the clever little mystery you’re trying to construct can’t just all come down to everyone’s being a bit odd. It’s genuinely impressive to me that the sheer force of the stilted dialogue and bizarre interactions actually manages to overwhelm the level of talent present within the ensemble cast. Come to think of it, I think Brian Tyree Henry, playing on of the cops, is the only one who manages to imbue his role with a little humanity.
It is tough to lump all the blame onto Letts, though – the whole production was fraught with calamity from start to finish. The production originally came to being in the wake of David Fincher’s success with Gone Girl. Fox 2000 Pictures – a now defunct subsidiary of, you guessed it, Walt Disney Studios – acquired the rights to the book by the pseudonymous author A.J. Finn (himself a whole other bag of worms) upon which the film is based in back 2016. Joe Wright signed onto direct in two years later, and, by the end of 2018, the film had wrapped shooting, scheduled to be released later on the next year. After the film test-screened poorly, though, the film’s producer, Scott Rudin, himself now notorious for his violence against and harassment towards his staffers, stepped in. He quickly brought onboard the academy award-winning screenwriter Tony Gilroy to rewrite various scenes in order for them to be reshot, and, sometime later, the whole thing was re-edited.
Now left with the, by now cold, corpse of whatever had come before, Fox 2000 had to move the release date to 2020, but of course, the end of the world occurred, so things had to be put on hold a little while longer. Eventually, the whole thing was handed off to Netflix, who finally published it this year.
So, it’s a little unfair of me to take Letts to task for everything here, just as it’s probably similarly unfair on everyone else involved – except maybe Scott Rudin. But I think there’s something more essentially wrong with The Woman in the Window. Every now and then we get glimpses of some sort of flair from Wright, buried beneath the layers of tampering but I just don’t think there’s much of a better film that could’ve made it out here.
Not having suffered from a condition such as agoraphobia myself, it’s a little hard to comment on exactly how Adams’ depiction plays here – maybe this is exactly how things are for its sufferers, but I doubt it – and I don’t want to ascribe malice where there likely is none, however I can’t help but feel that the device integral to the crux of the film’s drama, and even the arc of the main character, is a little tone deaf.
Throughout, moments that could play out as empathetic gut wrenchers are bled dry for their dramatic potential by the film’s desire to turn everything up to eleven at every juncture.
As Anna attempts to shoo some pesky kids, simply egging her house on Halloween, the score soars to melodramatic highs, Adams blubbers, sobs and stutters and Wright films things like the tortured doctor is attempting to keep the wolf from her door. It just seems hopelessly manipulative. This isn’t even to mention the resolution to Anna’s arc involving her being forced outside not in a calming, controlled environment but after she’s forced to just to stay alive.
It’s impressive to me that a film so desperately attempting to be a fresh, reflexive take on those gems of the fifties manages to one up them only in its tone-deafness.