Secret Window Review
by Andy Keast (arthistoryguy AT aol DOT com)March 17th, 2004
Secret Window (2004): *** out of ****
Directed by David Koepp. Screenplay by Koepp, based on the novella "Secret Window, Secret Garden" by Stephen King. Starring Johnny Depp, John Turturro, Maria Bello, Timothy Hutton and Charles S. Dutton.
by Andy Keast
Here is a decent thriller about an author who writes about killing, and proceeds to get mixed up in some killings himself. Oh, the irony. It's nothing special, but it is a goofy movie about murder and madness.
Morton Rainey (Johnny Depp) is a successful author who has moved out into the sticks due to a messy divorce to Amy (Maria Bello). One day he is visited by a
man named Shooter, who is played by John Turturro with a southern drawl and giant hat that suggests a disgruntled priest who killed an Amish for his clothes. Shooter claims that Rainey plagiarized one of his stories, saying his
story was published "in 1997." Rainey says he'll prove that his story was published first by retrieving a pulp magazine with the story that predates it by three years. Shooter is unscathed, leaving threatening notes and waiting outside his house at night. Local redneck police don't seem to care, and Rainey's bodyguard (Charles S. Dutton) suspects that Amy's new beau Ted (Timothy Hutton) may have hired Shooter and be behind all the mischief. Or did
he?
"Secret Window" is based on the short novel "Secret Window, Secret Garden" by Stephen King, which I haven't read, through I imagine it's very similar in tone. I saw the twist coming about thirty minutes in (not that there's a twist, mind you), however the film wasn't ruined by that. The performances and
dialogue are memorable. It's been at least a decade since I've read anything by King, but the film brought back memories of the flow of his better stories.
It has the feel of King's prose style. Characters get to ham it up with lines like: "You're gonna be standing with your head in a noose and your feet in Crisco." There are a few dream sequences -I'm sure distilled from the original
story- which were out of place and could have been cut. I became doubtful when
the slasher climax kicked in (all of a sudden the movie visits Sam Raimi country), but I liked how the film didn't punk out on its idea of what is "supposed" to happen to the characters. With that in mind, I'm wondering why the filmmakers decided on "Secret Window" for the title, when the movie is really more about the garden.
Stephen King is often pigeonholed as an author of supernatural horror, but in his glory days his novels were inhabited by convincing characters and touched by oddity and nostalgia. This is not a supernatural thriller but a gothic murder story. When I say "gothic" I mean just that: Depp's writer is an outsider in his life and in his mind; the movie enters his head and injects oppressiveness into an ordinary world. When Depp scrambles to get his copy of the magazine, I thought: *It isn't as if this is the only one in existence. Any good library could track one down easily.* But then of course if he did that, the movie's structure would collapse -and I may be giving away too much by saying that. "Secret Window" creates its own self-contained world and follows its own rules, even if they don't make that much sense. It obeys its alien logic, and is enjoyable as a throwaway B movie.
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