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Secret Window, Secret Garden review
2004.03.16 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole
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I've got a secret. [official site] |
Stephen King is famous for his horror stories, but he hasn't had much luck seeing them brought to the screen. He's had much better luck with his more serious dramas, like The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, and Stand By Me. Perhaps Secret Window, Secret Garden is an attempt by adapter/director David Koepp to bridge the gap. It's a nice try, but it doesn't work.
Johnny Depp plays a successful writer going thru a divorce and suffering from writer's block (as all writers in movies do). Into his country-cabin life comes John Turturro as a menacing, oddball southerner with an ax to grind. He thinks Depp stole his story years ago. The movie gets off on the wrong foot by failing to explain why Depp would take this guy seriously. The story was published years earlier (Depp compares the manuscript to his book) and we have no reason to think that Depp might really have stolen it.
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Johnny Depp plays a successful writer going thru a divorce and suffering from writer's block (as all writers in movies do). |
The story stumbles along a little further (and slowly at that) as Turturro's character gets violent. Again and again, it hits wrong notes, with Depp and his soon-to-be-ex-wife (Maria Bello of The Cooler) talking on the phone a lot (as all divorcing couples in movies do) and Depp reacting to his dog's murder by suggesting that he just show Turturro a copy of the magazine the story originally appeared in.
As a result, this is one of those movies where a minor problem gets blown out of proportion by a crazy person and escalates to murder while the victims continue to treat it like a minor problem. It's also a cheat. It shouldn't be giving anything away to say that a thriller contains the theme that "all is not as it seems," but in this case, that's the movie's trump card. It doesn't have anything else up its sleeve: no car chases, no explosions, no shoot outs. We never even see the murders or arson that occur, just the results (ask yourself why; there's only one answer).
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Depp and Turturro do a good job trying to inject some menace, lunacy, and humor into the film, but it's not enough. |
Depp and Turturro do a good job trying to inject some menace, lunacy, and humor into the film, but it's not enough. They don't get quite enough support from Bello or from Timothy Hutton as the new boyfriend, and Charles S Dutton is wasted as a private detective friend (if you can't see the word "VICTIM" written on Hutton and Dutton's foreheads, you need to get your vision checked).
Still, the ending isn't really predictable and could have gone several different ways even after the twist. The spookier parts may prick your spine, if you're that kind of person, yet the film doesn't stoop to many startled-cat tricks or gross-out gruesomeness (there's actually very little blood at all).
As a writer and director, David Koepp has done better work in his other psycho thriller, the underrated Stir of Echoes. And he has authored both good and bad, as in Spider-Man and Panic Room but also Snake Eyes and Jurassic Park: The Lost World. Between his best and his worst, his work doesn't span the vast gulf that Stephen King's does, but for both of them Secret Window, Secret Garden falls somewhere in the middle.
f e e d b a c k
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