Secret Window
2004’s Secret Window is a psychological thriller with twists, turns, and Johnny Depp! Based on the novella by Stephen King, this David Koepp directed film features an elegant musical score by the incredible Philip Glass. Secret Window has a few attempted Hitchcockian twists, but for the most part it’s simply far too average to make any significant dent in the genre.
Depp stars as successful writer Mort Rainey. Mort’s in the process of divorce with his wife, Amy (Maria Bello), and heads into his cabin in the woods to retreat from reality. He also hopes to get some writing done, of course. Mort’s wife had been cheating on him with Ted (Timothy Hutton) and the struggle to remain sane becomes overwhelming for Mort in his isolation. One day in the woods, Mort is confronted by a strange man named Shooter (John Turturro). Shooter claims that Mort stole his story and accuses the successful writer of plagiarism.
Secret Window follows Mort’s struggles with Shooter as he seeks to prove his innocence to the stranger from Mississippi. Events spiral out of control, as they often do in these types of movies, and people end up dying in the wake of Mort’s attempts at handling Shooter. Mort even hires a private investigator (Charles S. Dutton) to no avail. Eventually, it is up to Mort to find out the difference between myth and reality.
Depp is good in the film as Mort, as he heads into all sorts of quirky directions and even masters little facial ticks towards the end of the film. Despite his immersion in the role, the film never really is able to take off and it simply sputters and spouts as a tepid thriller with a predictable climax. Some will suggest that the film works better as an allegory for the creative process, especially the process known to us in the biz as “writing.” There is a whole lot of ground in the film that deals with writing and the art of going softly and succinctly insane inside another created world.
But that’s a cop-out. Secret Window is a thriller, plain and simple. The allegorical lines are so thin, as Koepp worked his damndest to edit and re-edit the “boring parts” to remove them from the film, choosing to spend little time on the tedium of writing (he says so in the DVD’s extras, in fact) and more time making things happen. Any allegory is thusly and quickly tossed aside in favour of more dramatic fare. So does it work? Is Koepp’s editing and direction more effective at turning the page as a straightforward thriller?
No.
Koepp, who has an ugly notch on his bedpost for the screenplay of Jurassic Park, chiselled and penned the screenplay out of solid granite here and the results are a less than human mishmash of dialogue and Doritos product placements. There’s such a lack of interesting lines and pieces of dialogue here that Koepp’s screenplay simply gives away the punch-line because the characters have nothing better to say. Depp, for all of his grandeur as a decent performer, struggles with most of the lines. Admittedly, though, his quirkiness comes in extremely handy when he says “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t on the verge of doing Snoopy dances.”
Overall, though, Secret Window is just too sluggish to get anything done by way of thrills, chills, or even spills. Turturro does okay in his role, although it’s much too much of a caricature to develop anything of interest (and rightly so, given the context). The twist, as mentioned, is pretty clear from the outlines left by Depp’s internal monologues and the unravelling of the thing is less than satisfying. Still, it’s a relatively harmless film and some might find some fun in watching Depp do his thing as a nutty writer in a cabin in the woods.
Trailer:
