While everybody else is trying to act guilty or weird enough to be a possible murder suspect, Amy Adams keeps her head down and plays everything for emotional honesty. It’s a losing proposition.
Everything has a chance to go wrong with a movie long before the actors show up. The latest proof of this truth just
Taken from a bestselling novel by Daniel Mallory writing under the pseudonym A.J. Finn, âThe Woman in the Windowâ comes from director Joe Wright. Like all filmmakers he is fallible. He also has âAtonement,â the supple 2005 âPride & Prejudiceâ and âDarkest Hour,â for which Gary Oldman won an Oscar, on his resume.
The novel, about an agoraphobic psychologist who witnesses a murder in the Harlem brownstone across the street, has been adapted by Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts, who also takes a supporting role of the psychologistâs psychologist. As an actor Letts has become one of the great, steady satisfactions in modern movies, and here his job is to provoke questions by way of exposition: Is this character malevolent? Sincere? Privately amused? Lying like a rug?