Rob Reiner (1990)
Stephen King’s novel Misery is essentially a paranoid-fantasy-cum-horror-story, about a best-selling author at the mercy of his ‘number one fan’. What’s distinctive about the film of the book, with a screenplay by William Goldman, is that its strengths are unexpected ones for the genre – good dialogue and seriously good acting. Paul Sheldon is a best-selling, trashy historical-romantic novelist who wants to write something better. (It seems unusual for a man to be a market leader in this particular literary department but the film doesn’t comment on this.) Sheldon is sick of Misery Chastain, the fictional heroine who’s made his fortune: in the latest novel in the sequence he’s killed her off. When his car crashes in a Colorado snowstorm – and in the middle of nowhere – Annie Wilkes, an ex-nurse, pulls Sheldon’s unconscious body out of the wreckage and gets him, and a manuscript for a ‘serious’ novel he’s written, back to her isolated farmhouse. She intends, as well as to nurse him, to keep him there; Sheldon, who has two broken legs, isn’t well placed to argue. Annie insists on burning the manuscript, which she tells Sheldon is profane and unworthy of him. When she buys ‘Misery’s Child’ and discovers that he’s ‘murdered’ his leading lady, Annie forces him to write a sequel resurrecting her. As work on the book progresses and Sheldon’s recovery from his injuries gathers pace, the psychotic Annie is forced to take increasingly gruesome steps to detain him and to stop the outside world from discovering her prized possession.
The film is virtually a two-hander for James Caan as Sheldon and Kathy Bates as his crazed admirer. Rob Reiner concentrates on their relationship and strikes gold. It’s unusual for a performance in this type of movie to win a leading role Academy Award but Kathy Bates is among the most deserving Oscar winners of recent decades. There are some wonderful highlights in what she does – the way she hits different notes in the course of a single line of dialogue and brings it to a ringing climax, the alarming moments of physical abandon. Bates’s portrait of Annie is also complete and, in spite of the extremity of the character, truthful. Reiner sometimes shoots her in close-up to emphasise her moon face; the effect is nearly cartoonish – except that the face is so humanly compelling: the animation in it comes and go; when it goes, the pale flesh is dead weight, and you feel sorry for and frightened of Annie at the same time. Kathy Bates creates a monster that’s scary and likeable (like Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates). You want Paul Sheldon to escape but you want Annie Wilkes’s dream to come true too. As Sheldon, James Caan, an actor who needs to do little to seem to be doing too much, is unusually expressive. Being bedridden and then in a wheelchair seems to work for Caan, who gets across precisely Sheldon’s combination of fear and incredulous, sarcastic humour: he’s particularly amusing in responding with forced, nearly manic grins to Annie’s displays of gauche girlish levity (one of her favourite phrases is ‘Heavens to Betsy!’) and gracious hospitality. The writer’s situation is a nightmarish bad joke: there’s very little he can get away with, not only because he’s immobilised but also thanks to Annie’s encyclopaedic knowledge of his books and the biography of Misery (who shares her name with Annie’s sow).
The quality of the lead performances makes Misery an unusual scary movie; in other respects, it’s a no more than serviceable thriller. When Annie Wilkes is seized with anger, Kathy Bates uses her size to intimidating effect; she makes you just about believe that Annie had the physical strength to rescue Paul Sheldon from his wrecked car and the bludgeoning violence in the movie is of a piece with Annie’s heft. The famous moment when she ‘hobbles’ Sheldon to stop him going anywhere works as comedy violence, not least because it’s over pretty quickly; the extended slugging fight between the two principals at the climax is a problem, though. This gory, thwacking mayhem is staged as if it were the culmination of what’s been a consistent feature of Misery but the change of style is jarring. By this point there have already been hints that Rob Reiner’s concentration on the actors, at the expense of constructing a robust horror film context, is going to leave him stranded at the business end of the picture. The fatal visit to the Wilkes farm by the local sheriff is a little reminiscent of what happens to the private detective in Psycho. Arbogast’s murder in the Bates’s house is a shock – both because it’s brilliantly staged and because we were expecting Arbogast to sort things out and restore order. He hasn’t had enough screen time to matter much as a person, however; in comparison, the scenes between the folksy sheriff Buster (Richard Farnsworth) and his wife (Frances Sternhagen) are regular relief from the main story of Misery: the couple are reminders of a sane world outside Annie’s farmhouse. (The small cast also includes, as Sheldon’s agent, Lauren Bacall, in a ‘special appearance’ which is nothing special.) Richard Farnsworth is so physically expressive (for example, when Buster is searching unsuccessfully in the snow for Sheldon’s car) and has such warmth and humour that, when Annie shoots him, it throws the film out of whack – in a way that, unlike in Psycho, feels unintentional. The killing isn’t mentioned again (it’s not clear what Annie does with the corpse or why Buster’s wife doesn’t report his disappearance) as if Reiner and William Goldman were embarrassed by the miscalculation.
It’s easy enough to contrast the concealing snow drifts outside the farmhouse with what’s inside but the cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld’s palette of browns and greys turns the dreary homeliness of the interiors into something increasingly worrying and Garrett Lewis’s set decoration, including Annie’s ‘cute’ animal ornaments, is excellent. Misery is a lot stronger as you’re watching than when you think about it afterwards. Annie Wilkes is something of a tautology: she’s not only the obsessive fan who kidnaps their hero; she also has a serial killer past. The belt-and-braces attempts to present her as a bogeywoman feel contrived since the nature of her murderous history doesn’t seem either to relate to her appetite for the Misery books or to chime with what she does to Paul Sheldon. When Sheldon looks through Annie’s ‘Memory Lane’ book of family snaps and press cuttings and discovers her track record of infanticide (mostly), Rob Reiner pours on Marc Shaiman’s spooky music (phrases in which evoke the Psycho score). This sequence is an economical piece of exposition but the discovery has no real impact – we don’t, by this stage, need to be told that Annie has killed before in order to be convinced she’s capable of killing now. Her derangement would be more focused (and more plausible) if it was triggered by her passion for Misery. It might even be more effective if it was the discovery that Misery’s been terminated that sends Annie over the edge – but that termination raises another problem with the plot. If Sheldon is so famous, wouldn’t his killing off of Misery have generated more publicity? Wouldn’t Annie, who can quote his every chat show and magazine pronouncement from years back, already know about it? And why isn’t Sheldon’s disappearance more prominent on television news?
Annie Wilkes switches instantly from desperate ingratiation to pure anger. In a split second, Kathy Bates raises the volume of her voice by decibels – it’s alarmingly stentorian rather than nervously agitated – but there are no physical telltale signs of the Jekyll and Hyde variety. You don’t see colour rise in her wan face or even a flicker in her eyes: except for nearly imperceptible changes in her facial muscles, Bates appears to accomplish the violent mood swings through purely internal emotional processes. Against the odds, she’s exceptionally convincing as someone who’s mentally ill because she makes you see that the mania is coming from inside. Annie Wilkes is an all-round loser. She’s shapelessly fat and physically and socially awkward, has risible cultural values, negligible culinary skills and a pathetic lack of dress sense (she wears drabs, blues and browns – and all the outfits emphasise her bulk and pallor). Annie’s character in the screenplay is detailed through a concoction of slurpy sentimentality (Liberace records), romantic novel fervour, and prudishness (substituting baby words for swear words except when she gets uncontrollably mad) – with a garnish of religious mania. These are familiar ingredients for a lonely, murderous nutcase but the actress’s skill keeps her character a step ahead of the audience. Annie’s madness is something to reckon with; as the film goes on, you’re sad for her when she’s depressed and happy in her moments of euphoria. Kathy Bates’s artistry and empathy make Annie Wilkes truly memorable.
3 January 2013
