Adaptation Insanity: The one that's the best Stephen King adaptation

 

Title: Misery

What Year?: 1990

Classification: Mashup

Rating: That’s Good! (4/4)

 

As I write this, I’m in an unplanned breather from my Halloween lineup, and the big change this time around is that I haven’t been leaning on movie reviews to fill it out. Now, I’m ready to get out one more, and I decided to go with more movies based on the works of Stephen King. And there was no better place to start than my pick for the best one of all. I speak of none other than Misery, as at a minimum the one that does the most to improve on the book.

Our story begins with a writer named Paul finishing his latest novel at an isolated cabin. He starts for home to a jaunty musical number, only to take a tumble on an icy mountain road. He wakes up to find himself being looked after by a matron named Annie who introduces herself as a nurse and his biggest fan. She assures him that the proper authorities and his agent have been notified, but proves evasive as he asks how soon they will come to pick him up. Soon enough, she lays out the truth: She has kept his rescue secret, while the wider world thinks he is dead. Annie wants Paul to herself, and when she finds out he has killed off the character that made him rich, she demands that he write a new adventure to bring her back. The author must write his own escape plan, if the nosey sheriff doesn’t get to him first- but the nurse is even deadlier than she seems!

Misery was a 1990 psychological horror film directed by Rob Reiner, based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. It was the 17^th theatrical film based on King’s work, though only the 7^th based on one of his full-length novels. Development reportedly began after producer Andrew Scheiman personally recommended the book to Reiner. William Goldman, a veteran screenwriter and the author of The Princess Bride, wrote the final script. The late James Caan was cast as Paul Sheldon and Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes, after the roles were offered to actors including Warren Beatty and Bette Midler respectively. The soundtrack was composed by Marc Shaiman. Few changes were made to the story, the most significant being the addition of the sheriff Buster played by Richard Farnsworth (d. 2000) and (spoiler…) the removal of an arc in which Paul publishes the final Misery novel after destroying a fake manuscript. Several early advertisements referenced a scene in which Annie severs Paul’s foot, which was altered in the final film. The film was a financial and critical success, earning over $60 million against a $20M budget, and won a Best Actress Oscar for Bates. James Caan died in June 2022 at age 82.

For my experiences, this is one where I’m foggier than usual. I distinctly recall seeing this movie on network television, and I can remember reading bits of the novel in the early 2000s, but I’m not quite certain which one came first. What I do recall is that I read the novel much later, somewhere in the 2015-2016 window, and very quickly concluded that the movie was if anything a substantial improvement. Sure, the book isn’t “bad”, but under scrutiny, it’s one of his more self-indulgent experiments, with a lot of on-the-nose venting that often seems to be at other writers’ expense. (Apart from anything else, Stephen King still hasn’t done a “real” sequel outside of the Dark Tower series…) By comparison, the movie improves as much as its medium can improve on a literary source, greatly aided by two superb actors. (And I meant to say a lot more about the soundtrack...) The one thing missing is the author’s searing hatred for his own character, which the novel transforms into revealed hypocrisy, but the difficulty of conveying that on-screen is obvious enough that the effective omissions of the ending are understandable.

Moving forward, I’m already feeling like this is a case in point of a movie “too good” for me to review in my usual format. What I find most worthy of comment is how easy it is to underestimate the rest of the cast in the face of Bates’ performance. Caan/ Paul himself is effectively turned into a supporting player, in itself a perversely effective subversion of the “damsel in distress” and the gender-role baggage that goes with it. That, in turn, pays off with real growth as the victim recovers and begins to develop his own plans. The big surprise is Farnsworth, whose only counterpart in the book is a nameless casualty of Annie’s wrath. He becomes an effective third player in the story, in the process adding a police-procedural element to the genre mix. It’s most intriguing to see his outside view of Paul Sheldon’s works. Finally, as with a number of things, his abrupt end is in its own way at least as brutal as anything in the book. (And dear Logos, I think I must have heard of the lawnmower scene when the movie was in theaters…)

Then, of course, there is Annie. What’s most striking is how easy it would have been for the filmmakers to compromise with an attractive or even “Hollywood unattractive” actress. Instead, we get a performer every bit as ungainly as King’s descriptions, without the script and cameras going into “fat-shaming” either.  We simply have a plus-size, middle-aged performer playing a character we could pity under any other circumstance. That is only the bedrock of her performance, which somehow gets more disturbing the more we can laugh. Then what I find most interesting is that her character becomes more sympathetic than the character in the original, and I have never been satisfied that this is simply because her bloodiest acts are removed or (arguably…) toned down. The screen version of Annie certainly tends to be absent-minded rather than actively sadistic, yet this is not played into a redeeming quality. It merely makes her less like Sid from Toy Story and more like Elmyra from Tiny Toons; she may not intend evil, but she is no less destructive for it. (Now I’m getting anger flashbacks to those idiot kids in ET…) To me, the difference is that it makes her more believable, and by implication not so different from any of us. And that brings me to a thought I had on my very first viewing, that her character would have been more disturbing and ultimately more frightening if the “backstory” had been cut entirely. All she needed to be was an outlier of toxic fandom that the wider world was still oblivious to. Portraying her otherwise was pretty much the same as making the big reveal in The Shining that Jack was a murderous wifebeater all along.

And that gets to the “one scene”, and there’s one that always stood out in the movie and the book. After Paul’s first attempt to revive Misery on demand, by rewriting the final scenes of his book, Annie simply says it’s “all wrong”. Paul is polite in asking for her input, with a level of returning assurance that will grow. To illustrate, she goes into a story of her childhood (which Paul questions in the book) of going to the serials, and an especially contrived resolution of a cliffhanger. Bates delivers it in top form, if anything with surprising restraint. She concludes, in a line that seems to be unique to the film, “Misery was buried in the ground at the end, Paul, so you’ll have to start there.” It’s all great, and it not only checks all the boxes of “AU” and “canon” that I can now hate that I know but does sound very much like me on one of my rants. This is what fandom is and was like, though I maintain that even then, we still understood that the point was to have fun. And I can give no better defense of the critique I laid out above than this, that if this sequence was the only time we learned anything about Annie’s past, the story wouldn’t be the least bit worse for it.

In closing, what I come back to is what I really think of Stephen King. I’ve been very sparing in covering his work, but I have still covered a good sample: Creepshow, Maximum Overdrive, Sleepwalkers and most recently Trucks. (See also The Signal, kiiind of...) These definitely give a representative sample of what I find good in Mr. King’s work. I can add that what I find bad, I cannot find in any story or book I have read through. My overall policy with King has been to sample cautiously, and either read what engages with me or respectfully set aside what doesn’t. The end result is that I have read some of what is agreed to be his best work, skipped a number of his “classics” and come to greatly appreciate some of his works that remain decidedly offbeat. (Again, how in Cocytus did we not get a Rose Madder movie?) The present film similarly shows how to get a good movie out of King’s material: Don’t worry about what’s most popular, or his “best”, but just run with something that’s different. It’s a lesson Hollywood may not learn anytime soon, yet there are enough quirky projects out there to have hope for the future. For now, we can appreciate what we’ve got. “Isn’t that an oogie mess…”