Review: The Woman in the Window is one of director Joe Wrights stinkers, even with Amy Adams as star – SF Chronicle Datebook

Amy Adams stars in The Woman in the Window. Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon, Netflix

A Joe Wright movie is like a box of chocolates. The first might be delicious. The next, you might have to spit out.

This is the director that gave us a repellent, joyless, nonsensical Peter Pan spin-off (Pan) and an Anna Karenina that made audiences root for the train. Yet this is also the director behind two great films Darkest Hour and Atonement and one of the best Jane Austen adaptations (Pride & Prejudice) of the past 20 years.

The Woman in the Window, streaming on Netflix on Friday, May 14, is, unfortunately, one of Wrights amazingly bad movies, and this is a shame, with Amy Adams at the center of it.

Adams is an indefinably great leading lady not in the sense that her greatness cant be defined, but that the quality of indefinability is tied to whats great about her. Shes not distinctive in a way that we associate with other movie stars. Her power is as a vessel of seeming ordinariness that is raised to a level of singularity. This makes her a stealth performer. Through Adams precise consciousness and depth of thought, her intuition and second-by-second communicative power, we watch as her characters are revealed by degrees. So, its disappointing to see Adams giving her intelligence to a vehicle so inadequately conceived that there can be no revelation.

Yet to think, it sounded great: Adams as a woman who snoops on her neighbors, kind of like James Stewart in Rear Window; with Julianne Moore, Anthony Mackie and Gary Oldman in the supporting cast, and with a script adapted by Tracy Letts from A.J. Finns novel. This movie has been on the way for months, delayed again and again, and when it turned up on the Netflix schedule, it felt like, Ahhh, big stars again. Big movies again. Normal life again.

Of course, one aspect of normal life, which tends to be forgotten in the haze of nostalgia, is that it contained a lot of bad movies. In this prime example, Adams plays a drug-addicted, alcoholic, agoraphobic therapist who spends a lot of her non-drinking time looking out the window.

The problem is, shes not very good at it. Unlike Stewart, who hung back in the shadows, shes visible to everyone. And curiously, even though people know shes watching, nobody puts up curtains, drapes or a humble shade, even before they kill somebody.

By the way, before the murder is committed, we know who did it. One of the neighbors comes to visit, acting slightly more wiggy than Peter Lorre, and the woman welcomes him into her home. True, its understandable that someone who never leaves the house might welcome a visitor with the enthusiasm of Gene Hackmans hermit in Young Frankenstein. But shes supposed to be a mental health professional, and if she cant tell that her visitor is alarmingly bizarre, she might want to rethink her career.

The supposed fun of Woman in the Window is that the woman witnesses something, but because shes a mentally unhinged substance abuser, the cops dont believe her and her neighbors feel at license to scream at her.

Gary Oldman has a ridiculous role, in which he flies off the handle in every scene. The screaming has no mooring in sense or backstory; its just an actor trying to do something with nothing.

With its superior cast, its intelligent art direction and a filmmaker capable of exceptional work, Woman in the Window is like a race car revving in a driveway, with nowhere to go. It shows that even the best actors and an occasionally masterful director cant get from the front door to the mailbox without a decent script.

KThe Woman in the Window: Suspense thriller. Starring Amy Adams and Gary Oldman. Directed by Joe Wright. (R. 100 minutes.) Streaming on Netflix starting Friday, May 14.

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Review: The Woman in the Window is one of director Joe Wrights stinkers, even with Amy Adams as star - SF Chronicle Datebook