Rear Window (1998)
Director: Jeff Bleckner. Cast: Christopher Reeve, Daryl Hannah, Robert Forster, Ritchie Coster, Ruben
Santiago-Hudson, Anne Twomey, Allison Mackie. Screenplay: Larry Gross and Eric Overmyer (based on the
story by Cornell Woolrich, and the 1954 screenplay by John Michael Hayes).
The human warmth and sympathies enlivened by seeing Christopher Reeve back at work in his wheelchair
cannot quite make up for the miscalculated and rather un-tense spin the filmmakers have put on one of
Hitchcock's greatest movies. Certainly, the spirit of the project does not seem to have been to improve
upon or even repeat Hitchcock's recipe, and the showcase of life-support and mobilizing technology that
Reeve uses is put forth frankly as the film's raison d'être. The medium of television was to give these
miraculous inventions a proper and popular visibility so that physically disadvantaged viewers and their
families might have some awareness of the systems potentially available for their use. Then again, the
Reeve character is a conspicuously wealthy one, so there is some question as to which of the units
installed in his apartment would be accessible to less privileged patients.
If the film's educational ambitions seem, then, a little misjudged, its credentials as cinema are far
shakier. There is a poignance to the handing over of this story to a character who is not merely waylaid
and voyeuristic, like James Stewart was in the original, but who feels he may never be able to do the
things—dancing, working, lying down comfortably on a bed—that the objects of his gaze perform each day
without a thought. The action in the satellite apartments around the focal point is not quite as witty as
the vignettes described by Hitchcock, but it is the portrayal of those more central events that suffers
the most and, resultingly, brings down the film.
Director Bleckner (also of television's Serving in Silence, with Glenn Close) fails to recall that
much of what made Hitch's plots so tantalizing and frightening is that the crimes and perversions almost
always happened in incongruously public, clean, or unassuming places: hotel showers, diplomatic banquets,
art galleries. Here, the woman whose disapperance drives Reeve to think she's been murdered is the wife of
an abusive bruiser, and is herself a graduated alcoholic. The husband even walks around in black T-shirts
with stylized demon graphics emblazoned on the front, and we see him threatening the residents of other
apartments, so the maximum space between fantasy and reality—a vicious lout killed his wife, or a vicious
lout did not—is not as interesting (or as compromising of the Reeve character) as when Stewart risked
impugning a man who betrayed no real signs of being capable of murder, or of being notable for any
particular reason.
Daryl Hannah, obviously no Grace Kelly, is written into a role as Reeve's architect co-worker, and by
being let off the hook of following in Kelly's epicene footsteps, manages to put in a likable turn that is
one of the warmer elements of this Rear Window. Her snooping around the Thorpes' apartment (they
are renamed—and why de-ethnicized?—from the Thorwalds of the original) is a bit sloppier than what Kelly
achieved. Reeve's own e-mail bullying of his cross-courtyard neighbor is so wildly reckless that by
all rights—and even by the strong suggestion of a too-early scene when Julian Thorpe meets Reeve's gaze
across the courtyard—he should have been at best reported and at worst revenged-upon well before the
climactic finale.
Jackie Brown's Robert Forster, whose participation in the Psycho
remake classifies him as a staple of Ersatz Hitch, has little to do as Detective Moore, and Ruben
Santiago-Hudson has a particularly discomfiting role as Reeve's Caribbean male nurse with whom he
exchanges patois greetings and broad "Yah, mahn" jibes. All very strange, and that's to say nothing of the
easy and questionably tasteful scares the first chapter of the movie gets out of tubing "pop-offs" on
Reeve's oxygenator that a flustered nurse/intern doesn't know how to fix. It establishes more
vulnerability around Reeve's condition and is, I am sure, a credible concern of people dependent on such
technology; this particular film's use of the instance as a suspense-builder just struck me as a little
off-the-mark.
I doubt Rear Window will have much of a life in the video stores, with the classic blueprint right
nextdoor on the shelf, and though a well-intentioned bit of Hollywood hooey, it's hooey indeed. Hopefully
Reeve will find other projects that accommodate his artistic potential even as they allow for and call
attention to his physical limitations. Grade: C–