Never Seen It #267: Misery

The blog. Sometimes it gives me the blues. When you first came here, I only loved the writer part of Puke on Your Birthday. Now I know I love the rest of him, too. I know you don't love me, don't say you do. You're beautiful, brilliant, a famous blog of the world and I'm... not a 400 movies I've never seen before type. You'll never know the fear of losing someone like you if you're someone like me.

Misery

1990

Rob Reiner

I used to be extremely against the idea of a movie adaptation of a book, but I'm softening my stance recently. Obviously, there are plenty of adaptations that still piss me off, especially when they change core aspects of a book that I love. The trick, I guess, is to not fall in love with the book first. That new PTA movie? The one getting great reviews and that I'd like to see ASAP please? I read the book it's (loosely) based on. It was fine! I would actually welcome some changes!

Stephen King has the most movie adaptations of any living author (there are like seventeen dead authors ahead of him), so this is a conversation that's been happening my entire life. Infamously, the majority of King's adaptations are poorly received (we'll eventually cover in this column the only movie adaptation that he directed himself). Maybe I'm thinking about this subject because the director of Misery, Rob Reiner, directed the BEST King adaptation, and one of my straight-up favorite movies of all time—Stand by Me. So it can be done, and this is the dude that's done it.

Possibly a moot point, since I've never read Misery. And I spend all my free time watching movies and writing, so I don't think I'll be able to get to it any time soon (maybe if someone rescues me from a car crash and then locks me in a room at gunpoint and makes me read books, I'll have time). I'm crazy about spoilers, but if it's something I'm probably never going to read or watch, then I'm less likely to get upset. So I figured it wouldn't be that big of a deal if I looked up what was different about Misery the book and Misery the movie.

The big thing, narratively, was that the book apparently featured passages from the stories that Paul was typing while in captivity (or perhaps stories that were already published, I didn't get that deep into it). That's pretty cool! It totally makes sense why this film eschewed such tangents, but it also totally makes sense why King would include it in the book. He's so fucking good at that kind of shit. My favorite chapters in IT were the interludes written by character Mike Hanlon about the history of Derry. I again get why they didn't make either adaptation. But didn't I see that they were finally adapting the history of Derry into a TV series? Maybe they can do the same for the Misery Chastain novels. Maybe HBO Max will let us know what was happening on the page while Paul's foot was getting sledgehammered off. 

Oh, and that was the other thing that was changed. I guess Annie chopped Paul's foot off with an ax in the novel? Apparently there was a discussion between director and screenwriter about the change during production. Does it make much of a difference? Feels like a brutal act either way. Sledgehammer might actually feel worse to me, just in the way it's less decisive. Seeing that foot smash sideways was probably the most squeamish I've been during a Never Seen It movie so far. I recall that Reiner said that a sledgehammer still allowed for a hint of sympathy for Annie, whereas an ax completely destroyed any possibility. I am skeptical about the sympathy, but I can maybe see it in some far-off sense. 

I don't think that Misery is presumed to be any sort of morality play or whatever. There's no question as to who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. King, at his best, is so good at building tension and gradually ratcheting up the horror. It's creepy when Annie is getting a little upset and spilling soup, and then later on, it's just as creepy when she's shooting the sheriff in the chest. (Plus, consider how much harder that screw is turned because the sheriff ends up being a really good guy who takes his job seriously and makes for a shrewd detective.) If there's sympathy in the vicinity of Annie Wilkes, it's sympathy for the idea that the world is cruel and there's no room for helping someone like her.

At this point I'm just describing horror films. But there's something special about these specific sorts of horror films. The ones that could take place on the stage, tightly wound with a small cast and limited number of settings. I like how streamlined it was, and yet still you find yourself on the edge of your seat wondering what's going to happen next. Kathy Bates and James Caan obviously fucking killed it, that Oscar for Bates well-deserved (yes, even better than Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman). None of these are interesting opinions. I'm just appreciating a good movie, just acknowledging what makes it work.

Maybe some books are just easier to adapt than others. Or maybe it's dumb to talk about good adaptations if you've never read the book in the first place. Either Rob Reiner did his job and made a good movie from a good book, or he improved upon the book by making a compelling movie. Either way, I enjoyed watching. That's all that matters. I can't even read anyway. What the fuck is a book? I ain't read no books.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

STRAY THOUGHT: I thought for a moment about deleting all the Ns from this blog post, but that would've been too annoying. Though of course this blog is usually not beneath an annoying gimmick like that. I just appreciate that I'm writing of my own will, out of enjoyment, and not because I'm afraid I'm going to die. Hey, that actually would've been an interesting thing to acknowledge in Misery—was the book Paul was writing under duress any good? That would've been intriguing if he thought it was his best work or something. Let's save that for Misery 2: Miseryer.

NEXT TIME: Group G makes their Film Club debut with 10 Cloverfield Lane.