Joe Wright
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Rear Window (1954)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced The Woman in the Window (2021)
Plot Visuals
Now to be fair, “The Woman in the Window” is hardly the first project to come along with a premise clearly inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic “Rear Window”—hell, I even remember it serving as the inspiration for an episode of “Kate & Allie” back in the day—but I cannot rightly remember a film that has done so little with the concept.
In its opening moments, it borrows the foreboding tracking shots and moody lighting of David Fincher thrillers, and a scene from Rear Window playing on a television telegraphs its obvious inspiration from the Alfred Hitchcock classic.
One of the obvious touchstones for The Woman in the Window is Rear Window , which director Joe Wright (of Atonement and Darkest Hour ) embraces to the point of styling his film like a Hitchcock pastiche, with a lurid palette and homages in framing.
Based on the novel of the same name by A.J. Finn, The Woman in the Window is undeniably indebted to similar cinematic and literary touchstones, ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (itself an adaptation of the short story “It Had to Be Murder”) to the 1995 thriller Copycat.
Any reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window is strictly intentional: early on we catch a glimpse of James Stewart’s face, in all its neurotic postwar glory, on Anna’s TV screen.
Clearly inspired by the works of Alfred Hitchcock, most notably “Rear Window,” this stagey, clunky production is set almost entirely in and around the New York City apartment of Dr. Anna Fox (Adams), a psychologist with agoraphobia who is separated from her husband (Anthony Mackie) and daughter and seems to be suffering from paranoid delusions brought on by a dangerous mixture of meds and alcohol.
Pride and Prejudice (1940)
Directed by Robert Z. Leonard
influenced Atonement (2007), Pride & Prejudice (2005)
The frequency with which Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has been adapted for the screen has been noted in a number of reviews of the most recent version, from first-time director Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley.
If one is to judge the new film version of Ian McEwan’s award-winning novel — brought to the screen by writer Christopher Hampton (“Dangerous Liaisons”) and director Joe Wright (“Pride and Prejudice”) — for its fidelity to the source material, “Atonement” is certainly a success.
Here she reunites with director Joe Wright, who helmed the 2005 version of "Pride and Prejudice," for which she received an Academy Award nomination.
Director Joe Wright (“Pride and Prejudice”) gives the film an elegant sheen and constructs scenes sturdy enough to bear the philosophical weight assigned to them.
Bottom line: Although this should've been the film on which director Joe Wright stepped up to the big leagues, it's actually less successful than his surprisingly satisfying debut "Pride and Prejudice."
Big question: Can director Joe Wright adapt Ian McEwan's novel to replicate the lush period sensibility and critical acclaim of his last movie, "Pride and Prejudice"?
Constantly under pursuit—the many chase scenes recall Run Lola Run—Ronan finds refuge with a British family (led by Olivia Williams) traveling through Morocco.
Once there was a German thriller called " Run Lola Run " in which its heroine does much running.
Saoirse Ronan ("The Lovely Bones" and "Atonement") plays a teenager who isn't the kind of girl you want to upset in this action-packed thriller that's sort of a juvenile version of "Run Lola Run."
"Hanna" doesn't deliver a typical Hollywood action film but rather something more akin to a European thriller like "Diva" or "Run Lola Run," films that are more expressionistic and stylized.
Luc Besson's "The Professional" comes to mind, as do the propulsive synth-syncopations of "Run Lola Run" and the dark allegorical menace of Grimms fairy tales.
She also runs a lot, an activity that has prompted comparisons to director Tom Tykwer’s 1998 Run Lola Run.
Initially, Wright leans hard on the classical Hollywood influences that are supposedly embedded in Finn’s text, though it does come close to citing its antecedents in an overtly precocious way by having Adams’ character sit and watch, say, a psychoanalysis scene from Hitchcock’s Spellbound at an early point in the film — you’re barely twenty minutes in, and you’re already being reminded that you could be watching something better.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Rear Window , Vertigo , Spellbound , Rebecca — and that’s just the Hitchcock influence.
In one scene, she has fallen asleep in front of the TV as Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound plays, filling the entire background with its hypnotic imagery.
Hitchcock isn’t the only callout from director Joe Wright, who also includes scenes of Anna watching such 1940s murder mysteries as Spellbound (Hitchcock again), Laura (Otto Preminger) and Dark Passage (Delmar Daves, with Bogie and Bacall), the images sometimes washing over her as she sleeps.
In one scene, we even hear snippets of dialogue from Hitchcock’s psychiatric thriller “Spellbound” (1945), a film featuring a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali.
The events of the battle have been dramatized stirringly several times since — most notably in the 1958 movie Dunkirk , the 1964 French film Weekend at Dunkirk , and the 2007 Atonement , with its indelible five-minute sweeping shot over the beach.
Atonement (2008), for instance, captured the emotion of World War II and, specifically, the evacuation at Dunkirk in one monumental, continuous shot, while also embedding its audience in a heartbreaking love story.
Capturing the “military disaster” of Dunkirk has been done on film before, recently in 2007 by Joe Wright with a memorable five-minute one-shot in Atonement.
Nolan's film gives us an impression of the waiting, the desperation, the hopelessness and hope of those days in early June, 1944, but it is not as permeated by the 'spirit of Dunkirk' as Lone Scherfig's "Their Finest" nor as overwhelmingly moving as Joe Wright's five minute tracking scene in "Atonement."
There have been film treatments of Dunkirk before, including a rousing reference in Mrs. Miniver , the 1942 film credited with helping to draw the Americans into the war, and an astonishing standalone sequence in 2007’s Atonement .
A couple of films have referred to the evacuation, notably Joe Wright’s Atonement , whose famous tracking shot took place there, and Their Finest from this past spring, a charming film about a group of British filmmakers trying to make a movie about Dunkirk.
In addition to tapping into Ridley Scott's themes, the film echoes ideas tackled in the recent films "Hanna" and "Ex Machina."
The film with which critics tend to compare this is last year's gorgeous and provocative Ex Machina, but the movie it really should be measured against is 2011's masterfully conceived Hanna.
Written by Seth W. Owen, the screenplay is blandly reminiscent of films like “Ex Machina” (artificial intelligence asking hard existential questions) and “Hanna” (deadly teen girls), only not as thoughtful or as elegantly executed.
Off the top of my head, the Species franchise and Hanna (2011) also feature a GMO girl assassin no one can control.
Indeed there’s a kind of audacity in putting out so lame a product while ignoring such recent entries as “Hanna” and “Ex Machina,” wherein genetic modification weaponizes the human form, or “Her” with its endearing, all-too-human operating system.
Suddenly, disappointingly, “Morgan” becomes a cross between the underrated adolescent-assassin thriller “Hanna” and the worst parts of the “Terminator” franchise, as a second protagonist — a ruthless consultant from the research corporation that has bred Morgan from synthetic DNA — proceeds to investigate the cause of the stabbing incident and the “viability” of the firm’s “asset.”
Partially inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice , Fire Island (2022) is a romantic comedy that celebrates all the messiness of friendship and romance.
This is a period referenced deliberately since screenwriter and star Joel Kim Booster ( Sunnyside ) uses Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice as the template for this story.
In “Fire Island,” a riff of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” written by and starring Joel Kim Booster, Ahn has likely found that moment in a bitingly hilarious yet earnestly warm approach to modern romance.
Booster plays Noah, sort of Jane Austen’s “Emma” transplanted to “Pride & Prejudice.”
In Andrew Ahn’s LGBTQ rom-com Fire Island, writer and star Joel Kim Booster affectionately takes Jane Austen to task on her maxim, reconfiguring Pride & Prejudice for men who neither have fortunes nor want wives.
Part contemporary spin on Pride & Prejudice and part travelogue for the island’s real-life gay mecca known as the Pines, Fire Island never leaves any doubt as to whether its variation on Elisabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy are destined eventually to get together.
The concept of a lead character who was raised in nature and isolated from the rest of humanity aligns Hanna with classic films like François Truffaut’s The Wild Child or Werner Herzog’s The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser, but Wright and his screenwriters, Seth Lochhead and David Farr, don’t study their heroine’s cultural miscues all that closely.
The King's Speech (2010)
Directed by Tom Hooper
influenced Darkest Hour (2017)
Visuals Characters Themes
Buttoned-up period piece-isms (a la Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech”) are blessedly hard to come by here.
In achieving this, the actor puts himself alongside Brian Cox in Churchill (tremendous performance, mediocre movie) and Timothy Spall in The King’s Speech (possibly the best-ever screen interpretation of the former PM).
Dillane shares some screen time with Ben Mendelsohn’s King George VI (the one Colin Firth played in “The King’s Speech”), and when they’re together, the air is thick with royal privilege.
Whether it’s the House Of Commons, or Buckingham Palace, where Churchill is summoned by an untrusting King George VI (played by Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn in an altogether sterner way that he was by Colin Firth in The King’s Speech) or the Cabinet War Rooms, every interior is bathed in heavy shadows.
(See: The King's Speech or this year's Victoria and Abdul.)
The King’s Speech, maligned as it’s been, was the better film.
It’s like a crackpot combination of Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!”, Ingmar Bergman’s “The Magic Flute” and Lars von Trier’s “Dogville.”
This is the kind of conceptual schema one might expect from a faux visionary like Baz Luhrmann (“Romeo and Juliet,” “Moulin Rouge!”) and not the director of “Atonement” or that fine Jane Austen adaptation “Pride and Prejudice” (both starring Knightley to far better advantage).
Lars von Trier’s “Dogville’’ (another tale of a woman punished for breaking the rules) unfolded on an even more minimalist stage set, and Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!’’ was an orgy of theatrical excess, but those movies are saved by their sheer inability to say uncle.
At its most frantic the cutting and staging here veers perilously close to Baz Luhrmann "Moulin Rouge!" territory for comfort.
In terms of theatrical style, think Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! without the songs and high camp tone.
Certainly one can understand why there may be hope the filmmaker who made Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” into a terrific movie beyond the source material could do the same for Tolstoy’s tome, especially by reuniting with that film’s star Keira Knightley, but from the opening credits, it’s abundantly obvious Wright has decided to create his own personal “Moulin Rouge!” with the material, setting the film’s opening on a large soundstage dressed up with moving backdrops.
The concept of a lead character who was raised in nature and isolated from the rest of humanity aligns Hanna with classic films like François Truffaut’s The Wild Child or Werner Herzog’s The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser, but Wright and his screenwriters, Seth Lochhead and David Farr, don’t study their heroine’s cultural miscues all that closely.
His Hitchcock homage takes a significant detour via the lurid delights of Brian de Palma’s own nods to the legendary director (think 1984’s Body Double or 1980’s Dressed to Kill ).
The movie takes elements of "La Femme Nikita" and Natalie Portman in "The Professional," along with portions of the comic-book gals who've wielded weapons at the multiplex (take your pick, there have been several in the past year) and plunks it all down in a not-very-brave new world.
It's not meant to be real, only a relatively asexual variation on the glossy slaughter games of "La Femme Nikita."
A Stranger in a Strange Land meets La Femme Nikita.
In addition to “The Fifth Element,” the film also borrows from “Run Lola Run” (staircase scene), “La Femme Nikita” (escape from headquarters scene), etc.
Think La Femme Nikita facing down Bullwinkle Moose's Natasha Fatale, incorporating breakneck running á la Run Lola Run (but without that film's clever conceit of random events leading to alternate realities).
Ronan is one of the greatest actors of her young generation and she is captivating here not only as a pint-sized assassin (evoking both La Femme Nikita and Natalie Portman in The Professional), but also in her extraordinary childlike wonder at the world blossoming around her. Isolated for her entire life, things as basic as music, electricity, airplanes, television and even best friends and handsome boys are utterly foreign concepts and more often than not present themselves as an avalanche of sensory overload.
Somewhere amid suspicious neighbors who might have killed someone, stormy New York City nights, and one too many instances of pill-popping and heavy-drinking, it forgets to have fun, aggressively molding its “Gone Girl” echoes into a contemporary “Rear Window” template (if that much isn’t already evident by the title).
The Woman in the Window wants to be a mix of Gone Girl and Rear Window .
His novel was engineered to tap into the domestic thriller genre boom begun with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and carried on in numerous other yarns, like The Girl on the Train .
Watching “The Woman in the Window,” we patiently wait for a “Gone Girl” moment, when our entire reality is shattered and an altogether different tale begins.
The novel it’s based on, a bestseller in 2018, was written by a senior publishing executive with the express purpose of cashing in on the success of Gone Girl , The Girl On The Train , and their ilk; that marketing determined many of the “creative” decisions (including the author’s choice of pseudonym, A.J. Finn) was no secret.
It’s more vivid material than his novel, which reads like the punch line to an outdated meme: “I forced a bot to read Gone Girl , The Girl on the Train , Luckiest Girl Alive , and The Woman in Cabin 10 , then asked it to write a book.”
In much the same way that “Lincoln” has made many of us believe that’s what Abraham Lincoln was really like, thanks to Daniel Day-Lewis’ Oscar-winning performance, Oldman pulls off the trick here.
Like Spielberg's Lincoln (2012), Darkest Hour focuses on a time of great political trial for its subject, the better to expose his leadership's essence.
By focusing on one month of Churchill’s life, Wright (Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) is very much working in the mold here of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.
Much like Daniel Day-Lewis in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln , Oldman is the film front to back, taking center stage and never leaving it until the final bow.
Oldman has described Churchill is one of history’s indispensable men, and the movie has echoes of Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln , whose subject was just as indispensable to the resolution of America’s own great moral and military crisis.
Like L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, Atonement is a genteel horror story contemplating how an innocent, Briony (played by the startlingly fine Saoirse Ronan), serves as an instrument of destruction and how this trauma defines her life.
The opening sequence is heritage cinema with a vengeance: Merchant-Ivory meets The Go-Between, lush details ladled on for the nostalgic as much as the satiric market.
Atonement opens on a little girl's doll-house and ends on an old woman's vision, and in between shuffles from The Go-Between to Brideshead Revisited to A Very Long Engagement before settling, naturally, on Titanic.
His scene with Knightley in a London cafe recalls "Brief Encounter" in the sound it evokes of hearts breaking over teacups.
Wright urged him and Knightley to look at mid-century British romances like "Rebecca" and "Brief Encounter," and these actors apparently took those movies, and the restrained but deeply emotional style of acting within them, into their hearts.
One scene in Atonement, when the unjustly separated young couple, bursting with grief, desire and eagerness, meet in a café, teeters on the brink of caricature as their polite, faltering self-control evokes the station restaurant of Brief Encounter.
Unlike Hit Girl, the underage heroine of the egregious " Kick-Ass " with whom Hanna will inevitably be compared, Ronan's 16-year-old is no foul-mouthed brat.
Superfically, and "superficially" is a really great adverb to keep in your pocket when you're talking about Hanna, the film looks like it could be the latest in the disquieting subgenre of teen girls killing people in sometimes very brutal ways, typified by the indifferently nihilistic Kick-Ass .
Of course the movie reÂminded me of " Kick-Ass " (2010), the action fantasy about a deadly young girl.
As with the recent "Kick-Ass," the kick we're supposed to be getting in "Hanna" comes from an innocent but deadly under-ager opening up can after can of whup-ass.
Indeed, the script’s militant daddy-daughter relationship is sure to generate comparisons to the similar dynamic in last year’s “Kick-Ass,” and online chatter has already hailed Hanna as a slightly older incarnation of Hit-Girl.
Her Hanna isn’t quite as entertaining as “Kick-Ass” dynamo, Hit-Girl, but Ronan makes the underlying emotions far more real and impactful.
The sequence feels like one unbroken shot, and has the same elegance as Visconti's long single take as he follows the prince through the ballrooms in " The Leopard ."
The ball scenes are masterfully handled in the manner of Visconti’s THE LEOPARD, and one sublime moment finds the crowd vanishing as Darcy and Elizabeth discover one another.
It’s like a crackpot combination of Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!”, Ingmar Bergman’s “The Magic Flute” and Lars von Trier’s “Dogville.”
Lars von Trier’s “Dogville’’ (another tale of a woman punished for breaking the rules) unfolded on an even more minimalist stage set, and Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!’’ was an orgy of theatrical excess, but those movies are saved by their sheer inability to say uncle.
Lars von Trier adopted the empty Brechtian sound stage for Dogville and Manderlay as a removal of the fourth wall and with no artifice von Trier boiled down the drama.
Other films - from Lars von Trier's "Dogville" to Andre Gregory and Louis Malle's "Vanya on 42nd St." - have used this device before, filming their productions on mostly bare stages.