Director: Rob Reiner
Cast: James Caan, Kathy Bates, Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I never fail to get a little pang of nausea as Untitled goes up in flames. Good argument for the cloud, if ever I heard one. (Says the man who still hand-writes his first drafts…)
Did I Like It: It’s going to feel trite to say “the book was better” but… ahem… The book is better. It’s a picky thing, but Stephen King’s novel is—horrifying though it might be—one of the best books about the love—and perhaps obsession—that is the writing process. After everything Paul Sheldon (Caan) goes through, he does not destroy Misery’s Return. He put real work into the book, and he wasn’t about to let Annie Wilkes (Bates) destroy another book.
Destroying both books may have a certain catharsis for the civilians, but it doesn’t do it for me.
Otherwise, the film is without flaws I can readily identify. Plenty of films try to imitate the trappings of a Hitchcock film, but few can tap into what a Hitchcock movie could do. Rob Reiner doesn’t get nearly enough credit for creating superlative films in disparate genres. I guess people are still stuck on Meathead at the end of the day.
Bates plays the terror of Wilkes not as some kind of boogeyman, which easily could have been the inclination. Instead, she is deeply (probably irretrievably) ill. As much as Paul Sheldon is a prisoner at the Wilkes farm, so too is Annie a prisoner in her own head.
The supporting turns from Farnsworth and Sternhagen might very well be the movie’s secret weapons. Every time they inhabit the frame, we’re instantly disarmed by their folksy charms. It makes the scenes with Wilkes and Sheldon far more harrowing, and Buster’s eventual fate is even more shocking when the two worlds inevitably collide. His small town detective as the engine for the film’s plot walked so that Frances McDormand could run in Fargo (1996).