Film: Paneful things

Secret Window

By Anthony Allison

"The only thing that matters is the ending...and this is a good one," says author Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) in Secret Window.

Not only is that a dangerous thing for a character in a Stephen King pic to promise--because it raises unreasonable expectations for a jump-in-your-seat surprise like the end of Carrie. It also begs damning questions: In adapting King's 1990 novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, why did David Koepp change the ending? Was King's climax, paradoxically, too cinematic to be credible?

Put it down to dramatic license, like Koepp's other changes, both minor (from tomcat to cute dog; King's fictional Maine setting, Tashmore Lake, moves to upstate New York) and major (the omission of an enlightening subplot about a fellow student in Rainey's creative writing class).

Isolated in his lakeside cabin, Mort, whose writer's block and virtual narcolepsy are symptoms of his depression over his broken marriage, wakes to find a stranger at the door, Mississippi farmer John Shooter (John Turturro), who claims, "You stole my story." Stung by this apparently accurate charge of plagiarism, Rainey plays a cat-and-mouse game with his accuser that ultimately involves Mort's estranged wife (Maria Bello), her lover (Timothy Hutton) and a sympathetic detective (Charles S. Dutton).

Turturro's incongruous Delta drawl and sinister black hat perfectly fit King's description--that Shooter seems to have emerged from a William Faulkner novel. But Depp, with unkempt blond mop, stubble and ratty, ripped robe outshines him with a beautifully nuanced turn as the increasingly unhinged wordsmith.

Nonetheless, this thriller fails to thrill, partly because Koepp (who directed the much scarier Stir of Echoes) is no Hitchcock, but mainly because the main plot twist is painfully predictable. The result, to paraphrase King, is "a tale you want to hear to the end, even if you have a pretty good idea what the end is going to be." Talk about a backhanded compliment.

Nordic wastes

Kitchen Stories is a comedy that only a half-baked Swede or an aquavit-guzzling Norseman could truly love.

Norwegian director Bent Hamer's film, about 1950s-era Swedish domestic scientists' attempts to study the kitchen habits of bachelors in a frigid backwater in rural Norway, brims with humor so droll, dry and understated it's effectively impenetrable to non-Nordic viewers.

The film chronicles the stilted relationship between researcher Folke Nilsson (Tomas Norstršm) and Isak Bjżrvik (Joachim Calmeyer), the hermit-like farmer he's assigned to study. As Folke attempts to map Isak's every move, from an umpire's high chair in the corner of his kitchen, the men gradually develop a warm friendship, to the chagrin of Isak's friend and neighbor, Grant (Bjżrn Floberg), and the indignation of Folke's by-the-book boss, Malmberg (Reine Brynolfsson).

Eventually, of course, the study falls apart, due to the inherent idiocy of its unworkable scientific methodology that attempts to comprehend the behavior of human subjects without communicating with them. "But you Swedes don't understand that," quips the exasperated Isak to his observer, pointedly. "You were neutral observers during the war too."

Though anchored by two refreshingly wry, expressive lead performances--Calmeyer's withering, peasant-like contempt, Norstršm's endearingly dogged haplessness--this gentle character study is too low-key for words. Audiences accustomed to the gross-out humor of, say, the Farrelly brothers or even the relative subtlety of the Coen brothers' brand of drollery, most notably the singsong Scandinavian cadences of Frances McDormand's North Dakota accent in Fargo, will likely find Hamer and co-writer Jšrgen Bergmark's fanciful scenario painfully slow, static and uneventful.

The original title, which translates literally as "Psalms from the Kitchen," perfectly sums up the religiously spare, unadorned simplicity of a film whose most profound revelation is that the Swedes were reluctant to join their neighbors in driving on the right (Sweden didn't switch till 1967). Aside from that, there's nothing much here but pure, Nordic whimsy.