The Lady Grieve: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD

It’s a total fluke of Hollywood’s pandemic scheduling that brings to streaming this weekend two mid-budget studio thrillers with movie star turns for middle-aged actresses. That they both center on women drawn into strangers’ high-stakes dramas while suffering from their own near-debilitating flashbacks to past trauma is just another coincidence, I suppose. If only they were both terrific. Alas, Netflix got the short end of the stick there, having picked up The Woman in the Window as damaged goods when it was sold off to the highest bidder. (20th Century Fox made the adaptation of the bestselling mystery novel back in 2018 — we don’t even need to go into the even wilder story of how the author was later exposed as a habitual con artist and fraudster in a lengthy New Yorker piece — before getting acquired by Disney, which forced reshoots that delayed the release, at which point the theaters were closed and, well, here we are.) Even if you didn’t know it was a troubled picture, it’d be clear right away it’s a muddled one. Director Joe Wright (Atonement) and screenwriter Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) have been given a pretty junky piece of source material, a transparent Rear Window rip-off in which an agoraphobic child psychologist (Amy Adams) spies some suspicious behavior from her new neighbors. The filmmakers treat the set-up as an excuse to swoop through a creaky townhouse, peer out windows, and glide across dark rooms as reality gets slippery. Eventually we get a host of marquee actors (Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Anthony Mackie, Wyatt Russell, Brian Tyree Henry) cycling through Adams’ home as she gets increasingly confused about what, exactly, is going on across the street.

With hysterical accusations, devious deceptions, potential psychosis and psychopathy, and convoluted conflicts, every scene could, and maybe should, be an excuse to chow down on ham, but the film somehow never delivers on that potential. The actors stand around waiting for the main course that never arrives. The whole thing is routine as can be, with dark and stormy nights, and gaslighting suspects, and circular arguments, pile-ups of red herrings, and boy, I wonder if Hitchcock himself could’ve made Google searches a compelling source of thrills. The picture looks as dim and muddy as its plotting. Wright doesn’t even bring his usual stylish flourishes with any consistency, which makes for a curiously restrained and sleepy spelunking into bloated paperback surprises. At best it’ll throw a clip from a Hitchcock movie on our lead’s TV, which might be a cute tip-of-the hat if it wasn’t merely a reminder of how far craft has fallen in a case like this. Even the big twists just meekly peek out and slide off, one more shrug before you go. At least Adams, much better served here than by the dismal Hillbilly Elegy, for whatever that’s worth, gets to put the entire lousy picture on her shoulders and nearly carry it solo to the finish line. She inhabits every loose nerve ending and boozy pill-popping distraction as her character’s unraveling unconvincingly brings her closer to actually leaving the house.

Much better is the straight shooter Those Who Wish Me Dead. Its opening act is a bow drawn simply back; the next 75 minutes or so are a direct flight of an arrow to a fiery conclusion. There’s something admirable about its easy confidence and sturdy execution. The thing delivers where it counts. The story starts with a boy and his father (Finn Little and Jake Weber) on the run from bad guys (Nicholas Hoult and Aidan Gillen) who want them dead. They flee to Montana, where you just know they’ll cross paths with the small-town cop (Jon Bernthal) and the troubled forest service firefighter (Angelina Jolie) whose introductions have been cross-cut with the rising action. Directed and co-written by Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water), with author Michael Koryta from his novel, the quick blooded tension rises fast. Soon enough, the film becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse game — machine gun hunters and their vulnerable prey — stalking through the woods. Shades of fairy tale logic, perhaps, with a little boy lost in the forest, wolves on his heels, a woodsman caught in a trap, and a beautiful lady by a lake who just might be able to help him survive. But the thing is too much a grizzled non-nonsense snap of a genre effort to push overmuch on its potential fable qualities. Instead, it rests on Jolie as an engine of redemption, a woman given a desk job, of sorts, after a deadly fire outcome that weighs heavily on her mind. Now there’s a rattled child who needs rescue. It’s easy to root for them.

The movie is short and simple, and all the more effective for knowing just how to lean on its best elements. It helps that Jolie, one of our great modern movie stars, has rarely had a straightforward starring role in the last decade—just four times above the title in live action and two of them were as Maleficent. She commands the screen and exudes competence, even in a role that’s so thinly drawn that there’s nothing else but her star power to generate interest. The plot itself, too, is built from stock parts, but Sheridan knows how to stage his thrills with brutal efficiency. The tension — close up threats against the wide open national park spaces — builds on a steady upswing as the various participants try to keep their cool and their control through strategies that eventually lead to gun fights and, by the end, a raging forest fire. There are efficient thrills to the sturdy brutality of its inevitable violence, the quickly sketched sympathy for the victims, and the consistently well-timed escalations of danger. If the movie still finds time for some loose ends — what’s in the letter? and did that Big Name villain just drive off after his one scene in hopes of a sequel? — there’s pretty much nothing important that isn’t driven to its logical conclusion. We don’t get solid mid-level star vehicles often enough any more. At least this one’s pretty good.

Mind Meld: POSSESSOR

Call Possessor a sci-fi thriller and a gory horror movie. It’s a queasy dissociative episode, or a woozy nightmare of mental slippage and extreme violence. You could also approach it as a cautionary tale about letting a gig economy subcontractor job swallow you whole. Here’s the sophomore feature effort from Brandon Cronenberg, whose work will surely be compared to his father David’s oeuvre, what with its cringing, squishy attention to fragile bodies in use and abuse. (One wonders what it’s like growing up with a last name that has become synonymous with body horror. Was a cheery rom-com ever in the cards?) In its steely gaze and slippery hallucinations — bodies melting and reconstituting like wax figures, faces worn over faces like slightly oversized nearly-lifelike rubber masks, double-exposure double-takes layered over mirrors — it recalls those earlier films, true, but also feels of a piece with the twisty and twisted, yet studiously dispassionate, works of Alex Garland, and not only because it features a supporting turn from Jennifer Jason Leigh in a matter-of-fact scientist role not unlike her role in Annihilation. It has that same ice cold digital surface building to spasms of disturbing knife-twisting, literal and abstract. 

This film slithers in on gliding shots that get pinned down like butterflies under glass as it is perched precariously on the border between sex and violence (an early sequence cross-cuts from a shot of lovemaking to one of a knife slipping into flesh), and between maintaining one’s identity and forging a new one. It stars Andrea Riseborough as a near-future hitman who is contracted by a high-tech company that’ll inject her consciousness into an unsuspecting victim who will be near the target. Maybe it’s a waitress. Or a friend of a relative. Whoever it is will carry out the murder, after which their body’s hijacker will unplug from their brainstem by blasting her way out the back of the skull with a pistol packed on her person. It’s gnarly, nasty stuff, and leads to a situation where the frazzled professional killer’s latest host (Christopher Abbot) might just not go quietly. The movie moves slowly, patiently twisting the knife and finding ever-gnarlier implications to explore. The violence can only be described as prone to geysers, and is often disturbingly clinical. Even with fair warning, I was still surprised to find myself squirming in my seat away from the screen at its most literally eye-popping moments. But even more disturbing is its attention to the ways in which its characters are totally lost in webs of psychic surveillance from tech companies both subterranean (like the killers) and legit (their latest target is a CEO (Sean Bean — and isn’t there a fun meta layer to casting him as a man whose impending potential death drives a plot?) whose devices snoop on people’s private moments to better know their brands). Its central figure is totally lost in her job, losing focus, and maybe her mind, in the violence she does to others lives, and the blowback that rattles hers. It’s a gooey, messy business in a carefully controlled film.

Puppet Show: ANOMALISA

Anomalisa is a small movie set mostly in one hotel room over the course of one night, focused claustrophobically on one man’s self-important feelings of loneliness and dejection. It also manages to be a story that could only be told through animation. That’s certainly not a pair of cinematic ideas you see every day. Call it stop-motion mumblecore, I suppose, if you’re fumbling for a taxonomic foothold. It follows intricately manipulated puppets, human figures at once totally obviously fake and uncannily real, flickers of subtle emotion and natural gestures behind soft textures and noticeable seams. The main character is a motivational speaker (David Thewlis) who is deep inside an impenetrable fog of sadness and melancholy, solipsistic narcissism mixed with downbeat misery. We watch as he stays in a hotel, a perfect dollhouse recreation of humdrum quotidian details, trying to avoid contemplating his unhappiness.

He has ceased engaging with the world outside his head in any meaningful way. Part of his problem is seeing everyone else as an undifferentiated sea of boring people hardly worth considering as individuals. Driving the point home, every other puppet has the same face, and speaks with the voice of Tom Noonan, sounding unusually soft and dull. The fog threatens to lift when the speaker meets a shy woman who passes the time chatting with him, first in the hotel bar, then in his room. She’s not like everyone else in his eyes. Her face looks unlike the others’. And her voice is not the dry monotone of strangers and family alike, but a hesitant and warm lilting Jennifer Jason Leigh speaking. They stay up talking and drinking, drawing closer and more intimate as the night goes on. They may be animated, but they connect on something like a human level.

And so the movie proceeds as a tiny, contained talky character piece with subtext laid out on the surface through consciously artificial but fairly low energy style. Written and co-directed by Charlie Kaufman (whose tangled, layered, high-concept screenplays looped so strangely and pleasingly in Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) the film represents his most restrained narrative ideas – a simple night of connection temporarily curing loneliness before an ultimate relapse into disconnection – told through obvious metaphor. Like his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, a wild, sprawling, and odd contemplation of mortality and thwarted ambition, Anomalisa has a precisely calibrated feeling of tracing endlessly through a man’s troubled mind. However, it’s much smaller, more contained, less strange – an unfolding emotional and psychological breakdown, but one of quiet desperation.

Working with stop-motion director Duke Johnson (probably best known for two claymation episodes of the unsustainable sitcom Community), Kaufman creates a film that’s alive when the man and the woman have their alone time together in conversation that’s tender and surprisingly real. The disjunction in seeing puppet people share convincing and adult emotional terrain together is both weirdly touching and a little funny, never more so than in a sweet a cappella rendition of a Cyndi Lauper song. But as Kaufman backs away from a more literal flavor into something more abstract – listen for Noonan’s voice filtering through in a sad fading of individuality – the movie becomes both more and less interesting.

Hermetically sealed and quietly felt, it’s a movie most true in moments between two people talking, and most false when it’s all supposed to match up with the overarching metaphor. Asking questions about what it means to be human through the plastic visages of unreal people, it finds only elaborately produced overfamiliarity. The whole thing is filled with awkward silences and padded with tedious normal tasks laboriously realistically portrayed. The imagery is so spare and normal it could be unusually detailed animatics for a live action shoot. It’s strange, a lot of work to detail and animate a world that’s basically like our own, for no reason other than to support the elaborate metaphor for self-inflicted misanthropic isolation on display. Tom Noonan playing all but two characters, every man, woman, and child, simply wouldn’t fly in live action, but here erodes any sense of connection to emotional reality anyway. It's mixture of real fake locations and fake real emotions left me cold.

It’s a movie concerned with a man’s sadness, and finds it all very poignant how he can’t even selfishly use a woman’s company on a business trip to break him away from his dull suburban family life, when really he’s self-absorbed. I was sold on the dispiriting soul-crushing mood, but not so much on why it’s supposed to be inherently interesting to find a man trapped in his own sad circle of cold detachment. Sad sack misanthropic self-help expert can’t help himself. Oh, the irony. There’s only so much sad puppet man moping I could take. Ultimately, Anomalisa is one of those movies that is exactly and completely the thing it wants to be. That thing just isn’t for me. It drifted away from my interest as it followed its hollow obsessions into emotional tedium.

The Deadly Companions: THE HATEFUL EIGHT

Quentin Tarantino’s films are unfailingly concerned with using impeccable craft – sharp widescreen blocking, showy camera moves, nesting doll narrative structure – to show off his video store savant chops. Each new effort is an excuse to raid the cabinets of his genre knowledge: gangster pictures, heist movies, blaxploitation films, kung fu cinema, spaghetti Westerns, World War II epics, car chase actioners, and Grindhouse exploitation flicks. He loves the idea of movies almost as much as actually having made a movie. His latest is The Hateful Eight, a blending of a Sergio Corbucci snow Western and an Agatha Christie locked-room mystery. It’s also easily identifiable as a Tarantino picture, not just in its predictable mixture of inspirations, but in concerning itself with secrets and revenge, violence and profanity, chatty killers and Rubik’s Cube plotting tied up in a bow made from faux-vintage 70’s tics. By now you should know exactly what to expect out of his films.

A Tarantino film always features long talkative sequences of deferred suspense slowly building to shocking outbursts of violence. It forms the backbone of his best pictures. (Inglorious Basterds, for example, is a cascading collection of perfectly structured chatty setpieces.) With The Hateful Eight he makes an entire picture out of one enclosed talkathon. Set in the years following the Civil War, at a remote roadhouse in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, a bounty hunter (Kurt Russell) and his captive (Jennifer Jason Leigh) are trapped in a blizzard. Stuck waiting out the storm with an eclectic group of strangers – a rival bounty hunter (Samuel L. Jackson), a stagecoach driver (James Parks), a hangman (Tim Roth), a cowboy (Michael Madsen), an elderly Confederate veteran (Bruce Dern), a Mexican proprietor (Demian Bichir), and an unpersuasive rookie sheriff (Walton Goggins) – he’s convinced one of them is secretly scheming to spring his prisoner. Each is an opposite of some sort to another, a tangle of conflicts and grievances ready to boil over.

The ensemble is Tarantino’s most derivative, from Jackson as essentially an older, chattier Django Unchained to Roth in a role that sounds written for Christoph Waltz. They, and the rest, are types and remain so, conduits for Tarantino’s words and pawns in his plot. At least the cast is made up of dependable character actors who are relishing the opportunity to speak elongated, dense, complicated paragraphs of chewy dialogue. The performances are crackling, but it’s Tarantino’s shaggiest, emptiest script, his thinnest idea stretched across three hours. Maybe that part won’t feel quite so acute years from now, removed from the elaborate White Elephantine presentation and promotion, conspicuously hyping connection to canonical old school epics like Ben-Hur through its 70mm format and reviving (sort of) the roadshow concept, from overture and intermission to the commemorative booklet. It’s less and more than all that, some of his sharpest direction married to his most hollow story.

Set almost entirely in a small indoor space with a raging blizzard outside, there’s a great sense of claustrophobic paranoia (echoes of The Things, emphasized with an ominous Morricone score) as the tough men size each other up, and the captured woman quietly looks for a way out of her chains. She knows who’s there to help her, but she doesn’t let on, both to keep his cover and to keep the audience’s guessing game going. It’s fun watching the other characters try to figure it out for themselves, a neat little mystery primed to explode. Cinematographer Robert Richardson (in his fifth collaboration with Tarantino) executes tight and elegant formal control, staging varied and interesting angles within the confined space, juxtaposing it with blindingly white vistas of howling winds and galloping horses. It breathes with lengthy takes and long looks, not exactly slow cinema, but of a relaxed pace that recalls, say, Blake Edwards’s unusual 1971 film Wild Rovers in its easygoing Western danger. Nothing like a Tarantino picture to make one want to scrape the back of the brain for obscure genre comparison points.

My attention did not drift once during the extended runtime. He’s too good a craftsman and has too good a cast trapped in a gripping hook for that to happen. But I did find myself questioning why I had to be watching it. All Tarantino films deal with “edgy” material, that is to say uncomfortable subject matter (the holocaust, slavery, and so on) used for genre ends and political points, loaded up with bloodshed and profanity in overtly movie-ish ways. But Hateful Eight is barely engaging in any serious ideas beyond “people can be awful,” and isn’t using any of the inherent subtextual tensions to meaningfully add to the suspense or the drama. It’s merely cheap offense muddying an otherwise engaging and entertaining experience.

Despite a black bounty hunter and Confederate veterans cooped up together, it has only fleeting serious thoughts about race, and despite the one woman in the bunch being a villain (we’re told she’s bad, but never why until late in the game) gender rarely overtly enters the question. It’s a movie that’s just out to tell its simple, nihilistic little story (everyone has their hateful moments) in a complicated, drawn-out way, exploiting hot-button ideas with no intention of using them for more than uncomfortable shocks. At least the plotting is reasonably compelling, and the mystery engaging enough. It’s sometimes fun, and other times nasty, but the two were mostly mutually exclusive here in my eyes. But being so long and so well constructed it had plenty of time after nearly every instant that lost me to win me back.

The film has a wicked mean streak, with slurs spat out for comic effect, a woman repeatedly battered for punctuation and punchlines, and an extended rape anecdote staged for queasy laughs. (That it probably didn’t really happen, and is instead a story told to make another character mad, doesn’t blunt the cackling glee with which the devastating act is visualized for our benefit.) The movie is willing to toss aside any possible avenues of empathy in order to go for a brutal moment. It’s an unserious lark with serious violations and sadism on its mind, feinting at heavy ideas to fill the bitter hollow pit in its core. The movie wraps up with Tarantino’s usual gnarly violence, cartoonish and self-satisfied gobs of gore spraying out from the cast members one by one. It’s a long-delayed payoff – half exciting, half disturbing – for so much talky, sick tension.

A release of a sort, predictable but vivid and full of his typical surprise kills, the climax also deflates suspense and danger, especially as many fatal shots are played for cruel jokes (even when it happens to characters we’re basically rooting for). It matches the amped up ugliness of the subtext, and the relentlessness with which most of the gooiest gore effects are inflicted upon women and people of color in the cast (most of them in a depressing mass murder flashback). The Hateful Eight is disturbingly easy, and often entertaining, to watch, but hard to indulge, playing with painful cruelty for light distraction. Unlike his last few films, where violence is modulated and contained within a moral and pointed context, here it is unmoored, grotesque, deadening. The movie is compelling but difficult, a pointed display of American bloodlust and prejudice that ends up grooving on such nastiness.

Lush Life: THE SPECTACULAR NOW

The Spectacular Now is filled with fine performances that make big impacts. It’s not just the leads, Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, as two teens in love or something close to it, who generate an emotional interest. I found even greater emotion in the faces of the character actors playing the adults around them. As a small business owner with fatherly feelings towards his teenage employee, Bob Odenkirk has only a scene or two, but generates an amazingly resonant and memorable presence. Similarly, when Kyle Chandler shows up late in the picture as a deadbeat dad, the sense of strained affection and inescapable personal failings is palpable. There’s a seriousness to the brief scenes with these men that extend to the film’s approach to capturing performances.

Director James Ponsoldt shoots the film with a sense of specificity and atmospherics, using a widescreen frame to grab intimate close-ups and spacious two-shots that register small shifts of emotions across a vast stretch of screen space. When the high school seniors played by Teller and Woodley go on their first date – he, an overconfident life-of-the-party guy; she, an introverted bookish type – the impression of the emotional terrain is vivid and subtly expressed. There are shifting feelings, of testing out the other, of hesitantly pressing forward and retreating, unable to reveal too much without feeling self-conscious about it, but plunging forward anyway. It’s all too real.

And yet, no matter how finely acted and well-crafted a film it is, Spectacular Now is ultimately nothing more than a dreary addiction drama embellished with uncommonly truthful performances, but ending up in the same place, walking over the same well-trod after-school-special plot beats we’ve seen before. Teller’s seemingly carefree kid is a not-so-secret alcoholic, wielding his spiked SuperGulp as a perpetual source of his next sip. Particular attention is paid to the way he’ll grab a red Solo cup at a kegger, pushes beers on his girlfriend, and traces his way back through the mixed signals from his most recent ex (Brie Larson) who is more simpatico with his drinking habits. His romantic prom-night gift to Woodley is an engraved flask. How sweet. It’s like Flight without the sensational plane crash sequence. Instead, we’re watching a slow-motion crash, as a promising young guy can’t even see his promise.

The opening scene shows us a blank page of a college application essay. The hackneyed opening narration promises to fill us in on what he writes, but he quickly discards the endeavor in favor of partying. The frustration of watching this character is as raw as it is affected. Ponsoldt’s been here before, in his previous (and better) film Smashed, the story of an elementary school teacher trying to hide the dangerous drunken lifestyle of her off hours. There as here it’s all too easy for a film to grow repetitive as it glumly traces a character’s long, painful downward spiral. Smashed had a sense of focus that helped keep it on track. It also had a fantastic lead performance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who also turns up in Spectacular Now as yet another of its few-scene wonders, playing Teller’s sober older sister. This film keeps alcoholism an ominous subplot, with romance foremost on its mind for a while. That the boy and girl Meet Cute when he wakes up hungover with no idea as to his location is certainly an unpromising start and a key to the film’s real concerns.

Like a Cameron Crowe movie without the killer soundtrack or a John Hughes movie without the cheerfully archetypical yet somehow convincing teenagers, Spectacular Now wears its heart on its sleeve. Unlike those directors’ films, it’s only so convincing, without ever quite finding its own approach. The screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who brought a clever (some might say too clever, but I digress) approach to young love with (500) Days of Summer, here adapt a novel by Tim Tharp, finding ways to tone down the emotion of love without misplacing heart. It’s certainly an earnest film, shaggy and spirited in a low-key, hangout kind of way. That the film flirts with dullness, occasionally growing drab and slow, is its price to pay. Some of the best scenes are the ones that simply unspool, painfully mundane dialogue exchanged between a boy and a girl eager to impress the other and quickly finding a comfort that allows their energy levels to merge.

They push each other in ways both good and bad. That all feels true. For some time the film gives equal weight to their plights, their single mothers (his Jennifer Jason Leigh, hers Whitney Goin), their dreams, ambitions, and attraction to one another. The interior lives of both boy and girl are balanced nicely. But because he’s the alcoholic, and the film in the end is far more interested in his struggle with that, she’s slowly diminished in importance until she becomes just a plot device. I’d say she’s literally thrown under the bus, but that’s not exactly true. (It’s a truck.) We so rarely get films genuinely interested in the interior lives of girls, let alone a girl like this. To go to so much trouble creating such believable characters in an even-handed way and end up downplaying one of them for the sake of formulaic Lessons Learned, for a character who is far more familiar, is frustrating. This is a film with considerable sensitivity and a fine cast, but which puts it to use on a plot that takes its time getting to much the same places any other less talent-rich after-school-special would go.