Skip to main content

The Perplexing Incompetence of The Woman in the Window


I remember a film class in college in which we discussed the voyeuristic qualities of movies, principally focused on Hitchcock’s Rear Window and the seminal Laura Mulvey essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, in which that film is directly referenced (it’s also the origin of the “male gaze” idea in critical feminist film theory). The thesis is that movies by their nature are inherently exercises in voyeurism and that they are centred in the male perspective, psyche, and (heteronormative) sexual desire. It’s a good read, though very Freudian, and certainly provocative even to this day. As pertaining to Rear Window, Mulvey notes its’ function as a metaphor for watching movies, Jimmy Stewarts’ inertness relative to the audience, and the erotic subtexts of his watching his girlfriend through his apartment window. We as a class also read into the variety of apartments he spied on, and how his observation of the central crime is tantamount to entertainment.
The same could be said of the crime witnessed by Anna Fox (Amy Adams) in The Woman in the Window, a film clearly inspired by the Hitchcock classic, and one that it could be said reverses the formula. Indeed, there is at least one scene that takes on the sexual “female gaze” as she watches her new neighbours from her spacious apartment across the road. And she too is sometimes kept company by a pretty blonde, Wyatt Russell. Like Stewart, the housebound, agoraphobic, and PTSD-suffering Anna has nothing much to do but watch people from her luxurious apartment as she takes medication. But the act of watching her watching them is harder to interpret so directly, obstructed as it is by a confused reality, maladroit filmmaking and a ton of fascinatingly messy choices. I’m not sure I want to know the psychoanalysis that can be read into this film. Hitchcock it is not.
The Woman in the Window is based on a book by A.J. Finn, adapted by Tracy Letts (who also appears in a minor role), his first screenwriting credit not based on one of his own plays. The film is directed by Joe Wright and was shot more than two years ago, but various problems even prior to COVID halted its’ release. And even after all that time, the rewrites and reshoots, it still wasn’t ready when it dropped on Netflix last weekend.
It’s the story of a traumatized former child psychologist living alone in her spacious apartment, who befriends a couple of her new neighbours: a teenage boy and his mother -only for her to witness the mother being brutally murdered and to then have everyone around her gaslight her regarding the whole affair and even the existence of this woman at all. Leaving aside the easy parallels to Rear Window, it’s a fairly compelling premise and definitely one suited to Letts’ home in the theatre. But a strong story does nothing against a lousy screenplay, and this one is quite bad. The dialogue is so awkward, the characterizations so strange –Anna’s tenant David (Russell) will blow up at her for no discernible reason or childishly try and jump-scare her, the investigating police officers will be unusually rude and blunt. There’s an extremity to nearly every exchange and one might think it an aspect of Anna’s unreliable point of view until it unequivocally isn’t. That’s just how the script assumes people behave. On top of this is some unpleasant ableism baked into the story concerning its’ depiction of a kid on the autism spectrum and the behavioural effects of Anna’s trauma –to say nothing of how everyone treats it. It seems so bizarre this came from a Tony and Pulitzer-winning playwright.
Meanwhile, there’s Wright’s direction –inconsistent, uncoordinated, often painfully at odds with the tone the movie is going for. He makes odd choices, such as shooting a couple arbitrary scenes at Dutch angles or emphasizing clips from classic movies that don’t seem relevant to anything. A few key sequences, including the critical murder, incorporate wildly inappropriate whip pans, and in fact a lot of the editing seems geared toward a comedy. I think Wright intends for them to be tools of horror –he uses a few conventional scare tactics- but they fail spectacularly, and sometimes are just incomprehensible. I still can’t tell how exactly the climactic confrontation was resolved, it was so haphazardly pieced together. Wright never quite makes use of Anna’s agoraphobia effectively either or the visual potential of her apartment. And then there’s a scene at the midpoint where the film becomes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and the pacing is thrown off for a flashback and twist reveal that nobody was really invested in (though it allows for a disinterested cameo from Anthony Mackie). It’s the first of a few plot twists, the second of which is interesting but is negated by the tiresome third. After which Wright decides to turn the whole thing into a slasher movie, complete with close-up shots on bloody butcher knives.
The otherwise very good cast is dragged along by a lot of this, though they too are guilty of insensible, peculiar choices. The best I can say about Amy Adams is that she’s better here than she was in Hillbilly Elegy, but that she’s going equally hard with unearned intensity to the detriment of the performance. And once again it is very awkward to watch. To those who criticized Gary Oldman in Mank, here is an example of a truly bad Oldman performance, outrageously over-the-top and in your face (literally) –and not in the fun way of some of his 90s films. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Brian Tyree Henry fail to make the best of thin characters, even Julianne Moore as the missing woman doesn’t seem comfortable for her one scene. And Fred Hechinger is just generally bad and offensive. Only Wyatt Russell really conveys an appealing screen presence and manages to make the best of the tripe he has to work with–he isn’t necessarily good, but his authentic charisma does stand apart from the rest. It’s a promising sign for an actor of his rising status that he can be the best part of a terrible movie.
The Woman in the Window was a frustrating watch for me, for reasons beyond the movies’ control –and I did wonder at multiple points if I should even bother finishing it. There’s a sad degree of ineptness to it coming from so many talented people, and it rarely seems to understand how suspense works or how people interact. Even the novelty of its’ strangeness wears thin after a time. Coming back to those theories of cinematic scopophilia, I consider the voyeuristic act of watching this movie, and conclude that on about any level its’ voyeurism is the kind that is unpleasant and distressing -and that you’re embarrassed about immediately after. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more