Misery
“After I finish shaving you, I’ll spoon-feed you some exposition.”
I hesitate to criticize Stephen King film adaptations that turn out well, because so many of them don’t, and Misery is a good one — I’d read the book, so I knew what to expect, but it had me in suspense in spite of that, and in spite of some of the grimmer material not making it to the screen. (Apparently screenwriter William Goldman felt he’d lose the room by Going There, and I don’t entirely disagree. The sledgehammer is bad enough; what it’s replacing is one of those things a movie probably can’t come back from.)
But I do have a couple of quibbles. Kathy Bates took home the Oscar for this role, and she’s very good in it (and, in an Academy year notorious for shanking GoodFellas among other egregious fuck-ups, the win is one of the few that holds up), but at times, the performance felt campy to me. I really like Bates, and she’s probably not to blame for the scenes in which she’s kind of choosing to stay on the surface of the writing. I’ve dealt with that breed of crazy, albeit on a smaller scale, obviously, and I can imagine it’s difficult to do nuanced justice to in the context of a horror thriller; I think she did it as well as it could be done, given the script she had to work with, and you know, at the end of the day, the woman is bonkety-bonk-bonk bonkers. But once her bonkitude has become obvious not just to the audience but to Sheldon, the character needs to level out a little more, if that makes any sense — some of the “oh, Paul” simpering in the last act didn’t work for me.
(The flip side of that is James Caan’s performance, which is some of his best work. I’ve usually thought of him as likable but limited, and I’ll have to revise that brief based on Misery, because one of King’s gifts in his fiction is how he can get you inside his protagonist’s head — he makes his characters relatable because, at moments of extreme terror, they don’t behave “cinematically,” but rather start singing snatches of songs or making terrible babbly jokes to themselves in their heads, just like you or I would probably do — and it’s not easy to evoke that petrified stream-of-consciousness King does so well in an acting performance. Caan does wonderfully with it. He can thank the editing for a small assist in a few scenes, but at the same time that he’s scared and angry, he’s also seeing the black humor. It’s good work, and subtle. My bad, Jimmy.)
My other quibble is the overclose. She’s holding Sheldon hostage; she’s referred to her husband leaving her, and after enough time has passed, I think most of the audience has inferred that she killed him. We don’t need to see a scrapbook making it explicit, and we don’t need to see a sheaf of clippings therein that make it clear she’s also murdered dozens of infants, not least because…not to get all profiler on you here, but murderers tend to have a type, and the type of obsessive stalker who imprisons her favorite writer is not really the same type who commits angel-of-death hospital killings. If someone with a stronger psychology background than mine (read: “any, beyond long-ton consumption of true-crime books”) would like to say otherwise, s/he may feel free, but that did strike me as…incorrect, and way too hard a sell given what we’ve already seen of her. She’s locked him in his room. She’s drugging him (or thinks she is). She’s gutted the telephone; she’s gone apeshit about the wrong-paper issue. That she is not the mayor of Sanity Acres, nor even a resident, is duly stipulated, so telling us she killed babies isn’t necessary and cheapens the work already done.
And that’s Goldman again, no doubt; he just can’t take the chance that even one person won’t get it, and that oversell makes a great movie into a very good one.
Tags: movies writing
I think the movie’s mistake was making that scrapbook into Baby Killing and You, because in the book she wasn’t so much a baby killer as a “poor thing” killer and a “dirty bird” killer — i.e., she killed people she felt sorry for and people who pissed her off. In that context, Paul Sheldon was both: a person hirribly maimed and psychologically scarred (even though that was largely Annie’s fault) and a big fat meanie (he wouldn’t write what Annie wanted). The book did a much better job of profiling Annie in a… well, not a realistic manner per se, but a believable one. You’re right in that a baby killer generally isn’t going to suddenly turn into a caged-writer killer, but the character of Annie Wilkes wasn’t really supposed to do that.
I am kind of ashamed of my Stephen King love, so um… perhaps I’ll stop here.
I could have spelled “horribly” correctly, but I felt that a typo or two would serve to further explain Annie Wilkes’s strange relationship to Paul Sheldon. Or, um, I was typing this on a keyboard with no Os because I am being held hostage by a crazy serial-killer blog fan. Or! I’m a moron. Your call.
I think the exchange “Paul, you can’t [burn the book]” “Why not, I learned it from you” should have been cut. Again, too much telling instead of just showing and trusting the audience to get it. Just have him burn the book; the audience will remember she forced him to burn his.
You know, it’s been a long time since I’ve watched the movie, although the novel is in heavy rotation in my comfy-before-bed-reading schedule, but I do remember being disappointed in some of the obviously cinematic differences between the book and the movie. The in medias res opening, with Paul hearing her distorted voice telling him she’s his number-one fan through a white haze ALWAYS seemed like a perfectly chilling movie opening to me. I understand Goldman needs to show us what happened to Paul, rather than telling us the way King did, but he could have gone back to that, after that perfect WTF opening. Then again, I still think the book’s structure could have worked here — King interweaves Paul’s flashbacks of the events into Annie’s narrative of the same in a way that I can totally see working on the screen.
It always bothered me, too, that the movie had Paul palming his meds instead of taking them and ending up hooked, but then again, I suppose that could be seen as an oversell as well. We already know he’s dependent on her because of his condition, so it’s probably redundant that he’s also dependent on the pills, but it was just such an interesting extra layer in the book, how *spoiler* even after he was free, he almost wanted to go back because of the drugs. Plus, it gave her that many more ways to torture him.
But still, Sars, I’m with you — the quibbles with this one, compared to, say, Pet Semetary, are minor. I just think they missed some really big opportunities.
This is one of my all-time favorite books, so I walked into the theater expecting to hate the move. I love, love loved it. And I hand most of it to Kathy Bates. She nailed it–as in she was actually the Annie Wilkes straight from my mind’s eye. I don’t remember Caan at all. Also, I found the book hysterically funny. Fifteen years (twenty?) later, I still remember parts nearly verbatim.
I’m right there with you, Sara. (Read ‘Duma Key’ yet? Talk about your inner character dialogue! LOVE!)
I thought the sledgehammer was more grim than what happened in the book.
And that new (insurance?) commercial with that sledgehammer scene in it makes me mute the TV & close my eyes!
@Sara: Hee. “You moro !” I did like that, when we saw him typing during the time-lapse, props remembered to take out the N key. Because I’m the kind of asshole that checks for stuff like that.
To this day, when Annie swings the sledgehammer back, and says, “It’s for the best”, I have to turn my head, I cannot watch that.
And bonkety-bonk-bonk bonkers cracked my shit up. :)
Actually, I was all set to never see this movie, on principle, because I am just Not a Horror Fan in any media. Still, cable TV does not listen to me, and after catching this movie in pieces, I was hooked enough to watch the whole thing. Caan is brilliant, especially since he doesn’t seem to have much of a script; many of his scenes are about watching the wheels turning inside his head, and he pulls that off very well. I am amazed how much tension can be wrung out of one batshit-crazy lady and the sound of her key turning in the lock.
The book would probably freak me too much, but at least there is now a gen-yoo-wine horror movie that I really, really like. Thanks, Hollywood!
Bonus points: My boyfriend wrote an excellent paper for English 101 about the depth of communication that took place when Annie and Paul weren’t even in the same room together. And bonus bonus points? BF and I have been calling each other “Mr. Man” and “dirty birdy” for months now. Love!
I remember reading when this first came out that Paul Sheldon was originally going to be played by Warren Beatty, who wisely backed out and recommended his “Dick Tracy” castmate in his place. Beatty told Rob Reiner something like, “You don’t want me, I’m a pussy. Jimmy’s not a pussy.” Good call all around.
According to one of Goldman’s books, he wanted to put the hobbling scene in there as it was in the book, and the director and producers talked him out of it. I think he may even have actually written it like that and they went over his head and had someone else write the sledgehammer bit in– it’s been a while since I read Goldman’s book, but I think that might have been what happened. The only other bit I remember that’s really interesting is that they wanted someone huge to play Sheldon– I think he mentions Paul Newman specifically– couldn’t get them, and ended up with Caan kind of as a last resort, and he said that it was the perfect choice because an audience wouldn’t have been able to get past the fact that it was Paul Newman being held hostage, not the character, and because Caan’s career had kind of been backburnered for awhile and he’d been out of the public eye he didn’t have that problem.
I actually really really like this movie. As a Stephen King fan, and an aspiring screenwriter, yes, it is an example of what adaptations of his books SHOULD be, even with the problems it has.
As opposed to, say, the mini-series versions of “The Stand” and “It” (both of which, as a side note, I’ve resolved to rewrite, if only for my peace of mind; I’m about 80 pages into writing “It”), both of which suck so hard that it boggles my mind.
The sledgehammer change, casting changes, etc:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100157/trivia
(I am still traumatized and have to close my eyes for the sledgehammer scene, too. *Shudder*)
“The flip side of that is James Caan’s performance, which is some of his best work.”
Jimmy’s performance in Misery is the thing that started me watching “Las Vegas”, although I do have to admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for him because of Rollerball.
Will someone please explain what the “original” scene in the book was…pretty please? I saw the movie (once) but I don’t dare read the book as I tend to have nightmares…
…but I’m dying of curiosity…
Hmm…I’d forgotten about “Misery”, until the DirecTV ads that wigged me until I realized they WERE ads. “Dolores Claiborne” will probably always be my favorite King adaptation, largely because of Jennifer Jason Leigh (whose I-like-the-taste-of-scenery-in-the-morning acting fits like a tailored shirt in this case).
There was a time, before I was old and hoary (heh), when I LOVED King; when he crapped his shoes with “On Writing” and the last couple of “Dark Tower” books, the love, she turned to hate. I don’t know if I could even watch one of his adaptations now, let alone pick up one of his books. “Lisey’s Story” was the worst–the WORST–thing I have EVER read.
Ever. Like raisin-coated okra-wearing cockroaches, people.
Totally agree on the whole baby killing scrapbook, I mean I was totally disturbed enough when you um, did every else insane in the previous ninety minutes and also not to be a complete film nerd, but that’s exactly what i am, she didn’t win over lorraine Bracco(Whoopi beat her for Ghost) although that would have made me feel better because Whoopi, really?
um, never mind, you were right, for some reason i have a thing against Whoopi and I thought that was the reason, apparently not but still Bracco deserved a supporting statuette over the Goldberg.
rayvyn2k, in the book she lops off his foot with an axe then cauterizes the wound with, I believe, a blowtorch.
Awww, Jaybird, I loved Lisey’s Story. I haven’t read Duma Key yet, but I’m hoping it’s kind of similar. I refuse to read On Writing, because hello, Mr. King, I have read all of your books and therefore heard enough of your “my brain is a special scary mystery” views in forewords and afterwords — okay, and Cell really shit the bed — but I definitely like it when King uses writers and their wives as characters.
Actually… I tend to like his characterizations of wives in general; when they’re not apeshit crazy and/or possessed, they tend to be the most sensible, realistic, and likable characters he writes. I like to think that speaks to his marriage and a very healthy view of his own wife, but… if the dreck Tabitha King turns out is any indicator, probably not. (On the other hand, would it really be that hard to be, or at least be perceived as, more sensible and realistic than Stephen King? Probably not, crappy “I’m a writer TOO” novels aside.)
I read a short story of Owen King’s that was quite good (One Story published it).
juliefir…thanks. Glad I didn’t read it…ugh.
Sara – you’ll love Duma Key. I loved Lisey’s Story and I loved Duma Key even more.
Yeah Cell was useless. From a Buick 8 also. Made of THE SUCK.
Topic? Uh. My main problem with most Stephen King adaptations is either terrible horrible choices by the filmmakers that completely miss the point of what made the original story good (Riding the Bullet anyone?) combined with God-awful choices of what stories to adapt in the first place. I mean… Secret Window? Really? 1408? I haven’t seen either of those movies, because frankly I’m afraid to.
Some of the choices for the Nightmares and Dreamscapes series on TV baffled me, too. “Crouch End”? Are you kidding me with that shit? I don’t know if that’s his worst short story ever, but it’s up there. And sadly even good stories didn’t come off so well. Autopsy Room Four is great, but since it relies mostly on narration of Cotrell’s thoughts as he’s lying there about to be cut up, it would help to choose someone who doesn’t sound so laughably cheesy trying to pull off those lines (Richard Thomas. bwah ha ha ha haa!) (See also: Awake, Hayden Christiansen. Actually don’t see it. I’ll help you out: it sucks.)
What about Dolan’s Cadillac? That’s an awesome story.
And that is obviously ignoring head scratching ones where the movie has zero resemblance to the original book (Arnold as The Running Man – ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!! Did the ass responsible for that one even READ the book? WTF?)
It totally embarrasses me to admit this, but… while obviously On Writing is useless, I kind of love his stupid rambly preamble notes to Dear Constant Reader from Uncle Steve. Because I’m a huge dork.
@ Sara: I know, I wanted to love it too. “Bag of Bones” and “Gerald’s Game” creeped me out but good, and I loved their protagonists. The latter, in particular, made both my sister and me literally black out at one point (the degloving bit), but the SOWISA (?) bit in the Lisey book just got old, as did the twee mispronunciations and the like. I used the book to kill a hobo spider, and tossed corpse and all.
My husband even bought “The Colorado Kid”, and I launched into it thinking it had potential, but in the end, King basically just said “What happened, happened, and there’s no solution.” In a DETECTIVE STORY.
I really enjoyed the first half of Cell (half the population suddenly goes totally, violently, apeshit crazy! What do you do?) but I didn’t love where he took it later. And I hated the ending (the very ending, not the resolution); I thought it was really lazy.
Oh, Keight, I love those silly rambly Constant Reader notes, too — but a whole book of just that? Um, no. I might read On Writing if it were a slightly different book entitled On Storytelling, but I feel like he’s pretty much said all he needs to say about his craaaaawft in his books, you know? Especially since… well, the man’s a kickass frisson-generator, but as an example of literary and/or grammatical precision he doesn’t stand up to all that self-aggrandizement. Finally (damn, I should just write a thesis), those little notes and afterwords and “about the story” deals are intriguing, but there’s always a part of my brain that thinks, “All right, Steve, that’s fine and all, but could you maybe scale it back on the ‘aging hippie mellow dude’ vernacular? WE GET IT.” I think a whole book of that would drive me to tears, and I’m not sure if they’d be of laughter or pain. (That didn’t so much end up to be about his silly little letters-to-the-reader, but I stand by it because I’ve been dying to say it for, like, five years. Whew.)
@Jaybird: “The Colorado Kid?” Damn, maybe I haven’t read all of his books. And, um, it sounds like that might be a good thing. I hated Gerald’s Game with a passion — in fact, I don’t think I even finished it; I definitely don’t remember the un-gloving thing — but I agree with you about Bag of Bones. I think that might be my second-favorite of King’s works (hah; imagine The Annotated, Unabridged Works of Stephen King), right behind The Tommyknockers.
(Sars? I am so sorry for taking over your comments. I’ll go away now, I promise.)
Right — because I of all people am going to put a stop to busting on Stephen King’s pretensions to folksy wisdom. Please, continue. Heh.
@Keight: Talk about grue that got cut — Running Man is a great example. Do you remember the end of that novella? With the…coming out and the…stepping on the…thing? Because that ain’t in the movie. I’m not complaining, really, but if you’re going to adapt Stephen King, adapt Stephen King, gore and all.
I hope and pray nobody ever tries to translate The Long Walk (or The Longest Walk; I can’t remember which it’s called) to the screen. It would actually make a great film, but there are so many ways it could go cheesily, Hollywoodily wrong that I tremble to think of it in the hands of, say, Ron Howard.
I think one of the worst things about latter-day King (aside from his general Cracker-Barrelyness) is the way he is shamelessly ripping off HIMSELF. “Cell” = “The Stand”, with a bit of “28 Days Later” thrown in. (King was a widely-publicized fan of the movie.) How many changing photos/paintings have there been? Anybody keeping count? I’d be surprised to find a photo in a King story that DIDN’T wave, or sprout fangs, or fart and then wiggle its eyebrows like Groucho Marx. Find a new conceit, Uncle Steve. And then ride it on out of town like the grizzled cowpoke you is.
Oh, the hate. It keeps me warm at night, which ain’t so good in south Georgia.
It’s The Long Walk, and can it really be nearly 30 years old? A Long Walk that happened today would totally be a reality show. Which, yeah, is probably a recipe for a truly awful movie, but at this point my expectations of King adaptations are so low that it would be *tremendously* difficult to disappoint me.
(Inline footnote: Goes for The Mist too. I had spent decades of my life wondering what happened to that handful of brave, screwed people. I know a lot of people were pissed by the movie’s ending, but I’d’ve taken almost anything, just to stop wondering. That’s probably morally indefensible, I realize.)
For Keight: Agreed that Dolan’s Cadillac is a rocking story, but as written, the movie would be an hour and ten minutes of watching one character bust his ass with a shovel, interspersed with about 20 minutes of flashbacks about his marriage and about his career change, followed by about 12 minutes of actual interaction… of a sort… between the main character and a couple of Bad Guys. I suspect it’s verrrry tricky to make compelling a movie with little more than 1 character and 1 set. No dialogue, no conflict, no dynamism. What you end up with in their place is Wilson the volleyball.
To work in more interaction between characters and/or more visual interest, you’d need to gut the story to an Ashlee Simpson degree of unrecognizability. A grimly determined gang of DOT vigilantes instead of solitary, obsessed Robinson. A big showy Rube Goldberg contraption of a trap set in flashy Vegas or Manhattan, rather than a hole in the desert. Guns. Explosions. Warring factions, minor characters to be killed off at 20-minute intervals. Instead of a largely interior-focused, very lonely and heartbreaking sort of story, it’d end up a Gang Caper Movie. It would suck.
Again, not that I would expect anything less of a King adaptation, but that’s my theory on why no one’s tried, anyway.
Oh man. I just Wikipedia’d “The Long Walk.” (The article gives EVERYTHING away, so… spoiler alert on a 29-year-old story?) Frank Darabont owns the movie rights. Mr. Darabont is the man behind “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile,” and “The Mist,” so he gets my vote for Most Likely To Not Completely Screw Up A Stephen King Movie…” er, now I’m kind of excited about this.
Anyone seen the DirecTV commercial? I normally hate these and cry a little for Sigorney Weaver every time I see the Aliens one, but for some reason Kathy Bates’ just cracks my shit up.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=iRgBS1X3MVo
“the novel is in heavy rotation in my comfy-before-bed-reading schedule”
Wow. Really, Danielle? Because as much King as I have read, that is the one book that I had to put in the freezer a few times. That was some scary stuff, mostly because it seemed so possible. The more over-the-top, supernatural things I can dismiss (unless they involve giant spider, gah), but Annie Wilkes? Eesh.
Anybody want to borrow my copy of “Duma Key”? Sorry, it sucked. Unless you’re up for a whole buncha exposition about how Florida Used to Be Beautiful But Then it Got Too Crowded.
And I love Stephen King (and I’ve got the groaning book shelves to prove it, but the man is, as a previous poster said, going back over and over the same stuff. Not to mention that he cannot seem to finish a story. The first three chapters are always great, and the ending is always, “WTF, you kiddin’ me?”
“”the novel is in heavy rotation in my comfy-before-bed-reading schedule”
Wow. Really, Danielle? Because as much King as I have read, that is the one book that I had to put in the freezer a few times.”
I’m with KAB on this one. When I finished it I threw it at my roommate and insisted that he get rid of it, that I never even wanted to touch it again. And I think that might have been the last Stephen King I read.
Weirdly, I’m in the “Misery-as-comfort-reading” faction here – I don’t know if it’s the claustrophobia, or the sheer relief of reading about someone more nutso/in a worse pickle than me (depending on whatever I’m beating myself up for at the time!) but either way, reading it feels like hanging out with an old friend, it’s almost cozy.
The Shining SCARES me – the rest of his stuff, not so much with the scary, but I swear to God reading Carrie, aged 13, was the first time in my life I felt that someone out there GOT what it’s like to be really unpopular and persecuted at school, that book did a whole lot of healing for me, and that IMO puts SK firmly on the side of the angels.