March 12, 2004 | As Mort Rainey, a seriously blocked author who’s woozily drunk on self-pity, Johnny Depp spends most of Secret Window looking like the “Before” half of a “Before and After” ad for personal grooming products. He’s perpetually unshaven and disheveled – his tangled thatch of oily blond hair practically defines the term “bed head” – and he never indicates that bathing is very high on his list of priorities.
When we first meet Rainey – that is, before the creaky plot mechanics are set into motion by writer-director David Koepp ( Stir of Echoes ) – he’s spending too much time on the comfy couch of his secluded country cabin, mired in a deep blue funk. He’s in the midst of a messy divorce from Amy (Maria Bello), his wife of several years, who’s already involved with another man (Timothy Hutton). Rainey can’t decide whether he hates Amy, or wants to see her again, or wants to see her so he can tell her how much he hates her. Worse, he can’t write, either.
It takes an unwelcome visit from a menacing stranger to rouse Rainey from his stupor. John Shooter (John Turturro), a drawling dairy farmer from Mississippi, appears at Rainey’s cabin to seek payback for plagiarism. Specifically, he wants comeuppance – and, more important, a major rewrite – for a story he claims that Rainey stole from him. A story, it should be noted, narrated by a character who murders his wife.
Rainey insists that Shooter is mistaken. Shooter insists he is not. Threats are made, people are killed, secrets are revealed – and Secret Window , which begins as a mildly intriguing thriller, gradually devolves into preposterous hokum. It doesn’t help much that the movie relies on a “surprise twist” to explain the seemingly illogical behavior of key characters. And it doesn’t help at all that this twist — adapted, like the rest of the plot, from a Stephen King novella – is easy to predict after the first 20 or so minutes.
Depp does his best to distract from the movie’s shortcomings with an aggressively stylized, borderline-campy performance that seems only slightly more naturalistic than his Oscar-nominated scenery-chewing in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl . (At one point, he actually gets to play a scene opposite… himself.) His attention-grabbing excess is undeniably fun to watch, even while the movie itself stumbles from one absurdity to the next. But it’s a bit disconcerting to see so fine an actor becoming such an incorrigible hambone so early in his career. Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier at least had the good grace to wait until they were well into middle age before they began to rely so heavily on tics and shtick, mugs and shrugs, while slumming their way toward easy paychecks.
