Secret Window
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| Secret Window | |
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 Secret Window film poster |
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| Directed by | David Koepp |
| Produced by | Gavin Polone, Ezra Swerdlow |
| Written by | Stephen King (novel), David Koepp |
| Starring | Johnny Depp, John Turturro, Maria Bello |
| Distributed by | Sony Pictures Entertainment |
| Release date(s) | March 12, 2004 |
| Running time | 96 min |
| Language | English |
| Budget | ~ US$40,000,000 |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Secret Window (2004) is a psychological thriller movie, starring Johnny Depp and John Turturro. It was written and directed by David Koepp, based on the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden by Stephen King, featuring a musical score by Philip Glass. The story appeared in King's collection Four Past Midnight. The film's studio is Columbia Pictures along with Sony Pictures.
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[edit] Plot
Johnny Depp plays successful writer Mort Rainey, who is suffering from writer's block and has retreated to an isolated lakeside cabin in the face of a divorce from his wife, Amy (Maria Bello), following his discovery of his wife cheating on him with Ted Milner (Timothy Hutton, who starred as Thad Beaumont, in the similarly themed Stephen King movie The Dark Half), now her boyfriend. Living alone in the woods, Mort is confronted one day by the mysterious John Shooter (John Turturro) who accuses him of plagiarism. Shooter gives Mort a manuscript he claims to have written.
At first, Mort regards Shooter as mentally ill and throws away the book. But his maid takes it out of the garbage believing it was his and instead of throwing it away again he cannot stop thinking about it, and finally reads it. It is almost exactly the same. The movie follows Mort's struggles to prove conclusively to Shooter and to himself that he has not plagiarized the story. Shooter continually harasses Mort and later kills his dog, an Australian Cattle Dog named Chico. As the story progresses, Mort hires a private investigator (Charles S. Dutton) and asks the help of the local sheriff, who doesn't believe him. The investigator asks if there are any witnesses, and Mort remembers a local man saw them together. But Shooter then murders both the investigator and the man and leaves them in a car. Mort then pushes the car into the river. Shooter also burns down the house of Mort's soon-to-be ex-wife. Mort is convinced that Ted is the culprit responsible for the burning.
Mort eventually locates the magazine that proves he published "Secret Window" before Shooter wrote "Sowing Season." He goes to the post office, where he gets the story. But when he gets out of his car, the sheriff approaches him with a smirk asking him if he could ask a few questions. Mort then leaves. But when Mort gets the magazine, he finds that the story has been cut out. Mort's inner voice tells him that since the magazine was sent to him in a sealed UPS package, Shooter could not have tampered with it. Prompting from his own conscience leads Mort to the realization that Shooter is not real, only a figment of Mort's imagination brought so vividly to life through undetected dissociative identity disorder to personify the dark side of Mort's personality and to commit acts that Mort himself feels he could not commit (murder and arson). During this revelation, his concerned ex-wife drives up to his cabin, and at that instant he changes his persona from the well-meaning Mort to the murderous Shooter. When his ex-wife walks in he is gone. She starts searching the house for Mort and finds an almost empty bottle of Jack Daniels on a table. We later learn that when influenced by Jack Daniels, Mort's second personality "Shooter" comes alive. All over the walls she sees inscriptions of the word "shooter". She realizes after Mort reveals himself that "shooter" actually means "shoot her". After she realizes this she tries to run away but Mort is too quick for her. He then kills his ex-wife and her lover, Ted, with a shovel and buries them in a garden where he later plants a crop of corn. Afterwards, Mort changes profoundly - his writer's block is finally over and his passion for life returns. The movie, however, ends on a rather sinister note. The local sheriff informs Mort that he knows what he did and as soon as they find the bodies, he'll go to prison. Mort dismisses the statement nonchalantly, and replies that "the ending is the most important part of the story. This one is perfect." It is then revealed to us that by growing and consuming corn from the garden where his ex-wife and her lover are buried, Mort is slowly trying to destroy all the evidence needed to incriminate him.
[edit] Cast
- Johnny Depp – Mort Rainey
- John Turturro – John Shooter
- Maria Bello – Amy Rainey
- Timothy Hutton – Ted Milner
- Charles S. Dutton – Ken Kelsch
- Len Cariou – Sheriff Dave Newsome
- Joan Heney – Mrs. Garvey
- John Dunn Hill – Tom Greenleaf
- Vlasta Vrana – Fire Chief Wickersham
- Matt Holland – Detective Bradley
- Gillian Ferrabee – Fran
- Kyle Allatt – Busboy
[edit] Differences from the novella
- In the novella, Mort Rainey has a cat named Bump, who is killed by Shooter. He never had a dog.
- The confrontation he has with Ted at the gas station never occurred.
- In the novella, Mort is shot and killed seconds before he is about to murder Amy. However, at the end of the movie, he kills both Ted and Amy and buries them in his garden.
- There are two notable differences between companies used. During the novella Mort Rainey often drinks cola, in the form of Coke and Pepsi, whereas in the film he drinks Mountain Dew. The company used to deliver Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine to Mort is Fed-Ex in the novella but UPS in the film.
- In the novella, Mort's story is called "Sowing Season", and Shooter's is "Secret Window, Secret Garden". In the film, it is reversed. It is unknown why the change was made.
- The novella takes place near the fictional King setting of Derry, Maine. The movie shifts the setting to upstate New York.
In the novella, Shooter is actually witnessed by Tom Greenleaf, as he passes Mort while driving and sees Shooter and his station wagon in his rearview, both of them transparent, and Greenleaf wonders if he is perhaps going insane. Also, Shooter does NOT return to Mississippi to 'write a new novel'--actually, he leaves a note for Amy saying that he's 'returning to his home' and that he'd gotten what he'd come for, the story Mort originally plagiarized from a classmate years ago, which suggests that a lot of Mort's involvement with Shooter (who seemed to be 'real' on some ghostly level, or Mort's belief in him made him so, which allowed Greenleaf to actually see Shooter) stemmed from his long-suppressed guilt at stealing the story 'Crowfoot Mile' years earlier.
