Misery (1990)
The last time that the late, great Rob Reiner directed an adaptation of a novel written by Stephen King, it was of one of his rare ventures outside of the horror genre, his typical domain, the 1982 coming-of-age adventure drama, The Body, adapted for the screen and renamed as Stand by Me. With that adaptation, which, at the time of its release, King himself referred to as the greatest adaptation of any of his writings to date, wiping tears of admiration from his eyes and enveloping Reiner in an appreciative embrace, Reiner proved himself as a filmmaker who understood the essence of King's stories, taking a simple narrative about a quartet of preteen male best friends venturing into the woods to locate the corpse of a recently killed 12-year-old boy and enriching it with loads of heavy, real-world subtext, fully dimensional characterizations, uninhibited performances, and subtly shifting tonality. To put it simply, King had discovered the ideal cinematic storyteller to bring his morbid stories to the big screen.
Five years after filming Stand by Me, Reiner tried his hand a second time at adapting a King novel, this one of the psychological horror variety that serves as King's bread and butter. However, unlike the majority of King's horror novels, which lean harder into gruesome displays of physical violence -- whether it be Jack Torrance emerging from a hallway and slamming an axe into Dick Hallorann's chest, Carrie White electrocuting her peers with live wires and trapping them in a burning gymnasium, or a horde of extraterrestrial creatures smashing their way inside a grocery store and feasting on the flesh of its human inhabitants -- Misery, published in 1987 and adapted by William Goldman, places its emphasis on the prolonged physical and psychological suffering of its enslaved protagonist, reserving its physical violence for a remarkably bloodless showstopper of a set piece and thrillingly cathartic climactic fight to the death, and limiting its onscreen body count to a measly one.
Misery is a palpably tense, unpredictable, breathlessly suspenseful chamber piece that uses a claustrophobic, confined setting, to-the-point setup, and a pair of dissimilar yet equally intelligent and conniving adversaries played to contrasting perfection by a stoically powerful James Caan and Oscar-winning Kathy Bates to tell a simple cat-and-mouse story steeped in prescient subtext about toxic fandom. Together, Goldman and Reiner rely less on racking up an impressive body count than in crafting and sustaining a suffocating atmosphere of unpredictability, physical confinement, and paranoia.
Paul Sheldon (James Caan), the renowned author of a series of Victorian romance novels named after its protagonist, Misery, has taken a customary departure from New York City to commence work on his next manuscript at a cabin in Silver Creek, Colorado. Grateful for the fame and financial security that his Misery novels have bestowed upon him, Paul nonetheless has reached a point where he's ready to say goodbye to Misery Chastain and start anew, writing a concluding installment that ends with his titular character's tragic passing.
On his way back home to New York in time for his daughter's birthday, Paul, having failed to receive a warning about an impending snowstorm, becomes blinded by a relentless onslaught of snow and accidentally drives his 65 Mustang off a cliff, crashing onto the ground below. As he lies beneath his overturned car, nearly unconscious and immobile, Paul is miraculously rescued by a nurse named Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), who purports to be his "number one fan" and carries him to her farmhouse, where she nurses him back to health. Over the next several days, Annie feeds, cleans, and clothes Paul while he lies in bed, tending his broken legs and dislocated shoulder.
Out of gratitude for her saving his life, Paul allows Annie to read his latest manuscript. While Annie has read every book in Paul's oeuvre, she's especially passionate about his Misery series, her relationship to the titular character so intimate it's akin to a flesh-and-blood friendship. As a result, when she reaches the final chapter and discovers that Paul has killed Misery Chastain off, Annie flies into a psychotic rage, revealing the steadily mounting cracks in her initially affable psyche. In order to make things right, Annie determines that Paul, once physically capable, must get to work on a new novel that will bring her literary best friend back to life. Trapped in the middle of nowhere in a home with gutted telephones, no neighbors to scream to for help, and deprived of the use of his legs, Paul is left with only his wits to figure out a way to gain the upper hand on his increasingly unhinged and dangerous savior-turned-captor and escape with his legs and life intact.
Stephen King recognizes that when it comes to telling an effective horror story, simplicity is key to earning audience investment and investing the nightmarish proceedings with the chilling air of relatability. While the genre and tone of Reiner's two King adaptations couldn't be more divergent, there is a symmetry between Stand by Me and Misery. Like that of the 1986 coming-of-age drama, the plot of Misery is simple, straightforward, and character-driven, chronicling the power struggle between a physically incapacitated writer and the vigorous, delusional nurse who brings him back to life, only to make him wish he had simply died in the solitude of his car. Goldman doesn't clog up the story with an abundance of irrelevant side characters undergoing their own journeys. He doesn't detail the concern of Paul's daughter when she discovers that he's gone missing. He maintains his focus on the author himself, immersing us in his story of recovery and entrapment, and the game of one-upmanship he gradually finds himself playing in order to survive, making us feel every bit as enslaved and helpless. Paul is abducted, under the guise of a rescue, and held prisoner in an isolated farmhouse, physically prohibited from leaving due to the extent of his injuries, nursed back to health from near death, but in return forced to revive Misery in a new book he never wanted to write. Now Paul must strategize, learn from past mistakes, and size up his opponent to even stand a chance to escape... or die trying.
The story is that blissfully simple, and Goldman doesn't complicate it with a prolonged setup or backstory. He plunges the audience headfirst into the claustrophobic scenario, opening with Paul at the Silver Creek Lodge, finishing his latest manuscript before getting into his car and driving off. From the initial frames, Goldman and Reiner visually demonstrate their protagonist's occupation as an author, use the natural atmospheric condition of a blizzard to create a potentially lethal car accident, and cut to only a single flashback to elaborate on the source of Paul's stardom and his motivation for temporarily departing New York for the Silver Creek Lodge. In the bargain, the filmmakers bestow a sense of character and sentimental value even to Paul's brown leather traveling bag, providing a motivation for why he carries all of his books and manuscripts within it. As an ominous touch, Reiner withholds the identity of Paul's supposed savior when she first busts open his driver-side door with a crowbar and drags him out of his car, shielding her face from the camera to make us doubt the extent of our relief.
The cinematography by Barry Sonnenfeld is visually stunning, intimate, psychologically insightful, and ice-cold, making the blizzard that serves as Misery's backdrop seep into our bones so we understand why Paul couldn't just crawl out the front door and to eventual safety. The weather is just as much a deterrent and opponent to Paul's freedom as the mad nurse herself. Exterior shots of the Wilkes homestead, situated in the middle of the forest, visually illustrate Paul's isolation. No other homes exist anywhere in sight. No visitors are likely to knock on the door. Because Paul's car is smothered in snow in the site of the crash, the only car in the driveway belongs to Annie, so no sign of Paul's whereabouts is present. The roof of the house is covered in snow, as are the trees and mountains that surround it. As the snow blows in the gusts of wind, it creates a whoosh that transfers the frostbite-level coldness through the screen.
Sonnenfeld zooms his camera in for close-ups of crucial details that color in the personalities of the characters: a hairpin on the floor that will be transformed by a resourceful mind into a key to unlock Paul's designated bedroom door and explore the rest of the downstairs; a cigarette, match, wineglass, and bottle of Dom Perignon to illustrate Paul's customary post-writing ritual; a ceramic penguin being carelessly turned from south to north to demonstrate Annie's obsessively observant eye and instill a sense of impending dread in the viewer; a kitchen knife protruding from its block to convey its significance to Paul; the knife and painkiller pills sliding slyly into the slit in Paul's mattress to illustrate his cunning; and Caan's unsettled, anxious face to accentuate his emotional gamut and provide insight into his thinking process. Sonnenfeld also uses high angles of Paul lying in bed to place the audience in a godlike vantage point, looking down on Paul, highlighting his powerlessness and immobility, seemingly taunting him.
While the showier performance undoubtedly belongs to Kathy Bates, exemplified not only by her Oscar win but the fact that only she was even nominated, James Caan is every ounce as integral to the success of Misery. In a way, he's even more integral because without him, Bates would have no one to act off of. Misery is a two-hander in which the acting ability of both participants is demanded to their fullest extent, and neither Caan nor Bates shies away from their equally arduous assignment. Though their personalities are polar opposites, Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes are two sides of the same coin. Annie provides the action while Paul provides the reaction, and the resultant contrasting interplay between Bates and Caan gives life to the greatest horror-movie pairing alongside that of Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (with the distinction of having occurred first by one year).
At the 1991 Academy Awards, Misery was only nominated for one Oscar, Best Actress for Bates, which it deservedly one. However, James Caan was every bit as deserving of a Best Actor nomination for the subtlety, empathy, wry wit, and realism with which he invested his imprisoned protagonist. He presents Paul as a beloved and talented writer with a refreshingly understated personality who hasn't allowed the fame he's acquired from his Misery novels to inflate his ego. In fact, Paul doesn't even seem to have an ego to inflate. Caan plays him as an ordinary, down-to-earth man suddenly thrust into the most extraordinary of circumstances, using sarcasm as his only coping mechanism. He's soft-spoken, low-key, unremarkable, and approachable, genuinely open to criticism over his work and modest about his alleged brilliance as a writer. Once Annie reveals her true colors and Paul realizes his status has shifted from that of a patient to a prisoner, Caan delivers a masterfully committed performance on both an emotional and physical level, internalizing his steadily mounting confusion, anguish, resignation, fear, and anger beneath stoic facial expressions. Even as Annie's behavior grows more unbalanced and her actions more monstrous and despicable, Caan maintains his composure and exhibits a cool, calm, and collected temperament. Nowhere is this more heart-wrenching and empathically infuriating than when Annie bullies Paul into burning his latest manuscript by threatening to set him on fire if he refuses. Through a pair of powerless, puppy-dog eyes, Caan conveys the nauseated resignation, sadness, and loathing that he's unable to in his affectedly casual voice.
His physical acting is equally phenomenal in its full-bodied dedication, with Caan selling the restrictive agony of dealing with broken legs in every movement. He never once comes across as an able-bodied man simply sitting in a wheelchair. Rather, Caan submerges himself fully in the physical realities of Paul's predicament. He captures the torture of carefully removing each leg from its footplate. When he throws himself out of his wheelchair or bed onto the floor, or has a ream of paper smashed onto his lap, he writhes in agony, his face drenched in sweat, drags himself across with the utmost struggle, clenches his teeth, grimaces, and emits painful groans. In his most impressive bit of trickery, however, Caan plays up the extent of his suffering to manipulate and disarm Annie, concealing his ingenuity. He adapts his behavior to accommodate Annie and strengthen his chances for survival, evinced when he strategically refrains from correcting Annie's pronunciation of Dom Perignon and complies with her chosen term of "chapter plays" over "cliffhangers." "They always cheated like that in cli-- um, chapter plays," Paul agrees with an obliging nod. It isn't until the explosive climax when Caan is granted the freedom to unleash his pent-up fury and aggression, and he relishes the opportunity with every ounce of strength he can muster.
As the nurse and number one fan from hell, Kathy Bates contrasts Caan's steadfast commitment to understatement with a star-launching, larger-than-life performance that fleshes Annie Wilkes out into a three-dimensional villain capable of both great good and evil, exploiting a cheerful smile and soothing, almost babyish voice to mask a volatile temper that could explode at any moment, in response to the slightest misinterpreted slight. When her services are initially required, Bates presents Annie as a good-natured, gregarious, brilliantly experienced nurse who rescues Paul from a blizzard and literally, graciously nurses him back to health in the warmth and comfort of her own home. Her personality is exuberant and childlike in its naivete. She refuses to curse, expressing her anger in babyish profanity. When a driver nearly runs into her car as she pulls into a parking lot, Annie screamingly calls him a "cock-a-doody" and "poop." In a striking contradiction to her political correctness, however, Annie has no qualms about casually referring to Michelangelo as a "dago."
Bates vacillates unpredictably between the ebullience and loving-kindness of a youthful professional, the hospitality and cooperation of an attention-starved loner, and the explosive, unaccountable outbursts of irrational rage and self-righteous indignation of a narcissistic serial killer. At one point, as Annie attempts to put Paul to bed, he screams at her to bring him his painkillers, pleading for her to "make [his] pain go away." Just when you think she'll explode at him for daring to raise his voice and issue demands at his caretaker, Annie maintains her sympathy for his exaggerated suffering. "It just breaks my heart to see you like this." Later on, however, she does in fact explode at a trifling comment. When Paul unnecessarily tries to correct Annie's term for serial films, her nostalgic excitement instantly mutates into defensive resentment. "I know that, Mr. Man," she screams. "They also call them serials. I'm not stupid, you know." Annie Wilkes represents the role of a lifetime for Bates, and she patently has the time of her life performing it. She's unafraid to show off the cornier side of Annie's disposition, snorting in imitation of her pig, Misery, and jumping around in irrepressible excitement over the resurrection of her favorite literary character as though she were her best friend. Bates is alternately charming, pathetic, and terrifying.
Beneath her overstimulated and volatile demeanor, nonetheless, exists a deeply melancholic, alienated soul, and Bates doesn't neglect to capture her deep-seated loneliness and low self-esteem in a despondent voice and lethargic eyes that counterbalance her monstrousness and selfishness with a layer of heartbreaking humanity. Annie is the complex, hateful, multifaceted antagonist that many accuse Mildred Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest of being. On her own, Nurse Ratched is a mere control freak who refuses to bend her own rules for the convenience of her patients. In comparison to Annie, Ratched is an angel.
As Annie slips further into the realm of delusion, Bates contrasts her initial naivete with flashes of sophistication and perception, evinced when she determines that Paul has been out of his room based on the position of her ceramic penguin, insisting it "always faces due south," and discovers the knife hidden within his mattress. Annie is much more observant and intelligent than she lets on, and at times, the two sides of her seem to compete for dominance: the delusional psychopath who convinces herself that Paul just needs more time to adjust to spending the rest of his life with her, and the clear-eyed loser who knows Paul doesn't love her and can't wait for his legs to heal so he can go home. Suffering a bout of melancholy on a rainy night, Annie bemoans, "You're a beautiful, brilliant, famous man of the world, and I'm... not a movie-star type." An ironic statement considering this is the role that single-handedly made her one.
On a symbolic level, Annie is a flesh-and-blood representation of toxic fandom, a prescient depiction of someone who fetishizes the fictitious writings of her idol to the point where their art supersedes their humanity. When Annie first comes across Paul's unconscious body and hauls him back to her house, it appears to be a blessing, an act of life-saving heroism. In actuality, it's a ploy to ensure that Paul may live long enough to continue writing his Misery novels. She doesn't want him to survive so much as she wants his character to. Annie repeatedly assures Paul that she's his number one fan, but she only values the "life" of Misery Chastain, not the living, breathing man who created her. In Annie's mind, Paul is nothing more than a means to keep her favorite literary character alive on the page.
In the centerpiece of Misery, Paul awakens one morning to find Annie tying him to his bed as she reveals knowledge of his surreptitious excursions around the home. As Paul squirms in vain, Reiner engineers an insufferable mood of anxiety through Annie's deceptively pleasant and calm demeanor, patient pacing, close-ups of the kitchen knife and a sledgehammer beside her emotionless visage, a block of wood carefully positioned between Paul's bruised feet, and, as his master stroke, the contrastingly tranquil and haunting tune of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on the soundtrack. Bates' placid face and matter-of-fact explanation of hobbling are more dread-inducing than any foaming-at-the-mouth outburst could be. Editor Robert Leighton, returning from his previous stint as Reiner's editor for Stand by Me, cuts dreadfully between Paul's quietly pleading face and Annie's psychotically calm one before Annie raises the sledgehammer behind her shoulder and swings it forward, breaking Paul's left ankle. Under Reiner's unblinking yet tactful direction, Leighton permits a glimpse of Paul's left foot twisting in the opposite direction before cutting to a close-up of his face, contorting in an anguished scream. Beyond that initial glimpse, Reiner uses the crunching of Paul's ankle bones and his blood-curdling screams to subliminally complete the grotesque image, devoid of blood either displayed or implied.
As much as Stephen King's stories are a good fit for Reiner's directorial vision, so is Leighton the perfect match for Reiner's tone-building and economic pacing. Once Paul develops enough inspiration to write the resurrection for Misery demanded by Annie, the words begin to flow through him at a steady pace, a creative process that Leighton expresses with a montage of Paul typing his manuscript, day and night, at his writer's desk. His body sits stagnantly in his wheelchair, but his fingers won't stop moving, pressing one key after another. This technique propels the story along at a concise, upbeat tempo while illustrating the rapid passing of weeks, set to the jaunty, propulsive background music of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1.
In the most nerve-racking close-call sequence, Paul, who's escaped the confines of his bedroom and is searching the house for weapons, hears the sound of Annie's truck reentering her driveway. Leighton cuts back and forth between Annie's arrival, stepping out of her truck and lugging Paul's typing paper up the patio steps, and Paul scrambling back into his wheelchair and toward his bedroom to create breathtaking suspense and paranoia, accompanied by a rousing, Harry Manfredini-esque score from Marc Shaiman. He crosscuts a close-up of Annie's feet calmly walking up the patio steps with Paul's hand hurriedly spinning his wheelchair wheel, Annie's house key sliding into the front door as Paul's hairpin jiggles into his bedroom lock, juxtaposing Annie's unsuspecting tranquility with Paul's heart-racing desperation. Leighton and Reiner milk the moment for every possible drop of tension, having Annie drop the papers outside to buy Paul more time, forcing Paul to reclose the door across from his bedroom that he forgot he'd opened.
In Stand by Me, Reiner and his screenwriters narrowed their focus intimately on the preteen quartet, diverging only sporadically to catch up with an older gang of teenage hoodlums to detail their more mischievous antics. In a similar vein, Goldman's script interweaves Paul's ordeal and evolving relationship with Annie with a subplot centered on Buster (Richard Farnsworth), the town sheriff, and his wife slash part-time deputy, Virginia (Frances Sternhagen), the former of whom is conducting a private investigation into Paul's whereabouts. The interplay between Buster and Virginia counterbalances the tension and hostility of the primary relationship with the warmth, tenderness, and banter of an old married couple who have clearly been together for a long time and are guaranteed to live out the rest of their lives in each other's company, irritable as they tend to make each other. The combination of Farnsworth's unserious grouchiness and Fernhagen's sarcastic wit adds a sprinkle of comic relief atop the pressure cooker without detracting from its urgency or suspense.
After subjecting our hero to various displays of physical and psychological torment -- sticking him in the arm with sedative needles, threatening to smash a chair over his head, coercing him into burning his manuscript, and most unforgivingly of all, breaking his ankles in one fell swoop -- Goldman and Reiner pay off our intensifying salivation for comeuppance with a climactic fight to the death, a battle of wits, fists, kicks, and even metal pigs. It's viscerally gratifying, providing a cathartic release from the vicarious contempt generated for Annie through Paul's gaining of the upper hand, yet, like its villain, nuanced with tragic poignancy. The confrontation is ephemeral, but packs a bloody wallop, its most applause-worthy moment occurring when Paul bangs Annie's head against the floor repeatedly, shoves the burned remains of Misery's Return into her mouth, and growls, "You want it? Eat it. Eat it till you choke, you sick, twisted fuck!" This is the eminently exhilarating fate that Annie unquestionably deserves, and yet, thanks to the care with which she's been written and the multidimensionality of Bates' gloriously uninhibited and passionate performance, I still retain more than a scintilla of compassion for her, a powerful feat considering her scrapbook reveals her to be a baby killer.
Goldman deploys the motif of the killer regaining consciousness after their assumed death for one last scare, paving the way for a double blow as creative in its choice of weapon as it is brutal in its metal-to-face collision, as Paul smashes a cast iron doorstop of Misery the pig twice against Annie's forehead, fracturing her skull. Before she succumbs, Annie looks down at Paul, her face covered in blood, with an expression of sadness and collapses onto his chest, a visual reinforcement of her lifelong craving for companionship and affection.
8.2/10
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