MISERY
A film review by Richard Barrett
Copyright 1990 Richard Barrett
Stephen King evidently dislikes writers a great deal. In THE SHINING, a playwright gets possessed by a maniacal mansion and tries to kill his family. In STAND BY ME, a young writer wanna-be finds a leech sucking blood from his testicles. And now, in MISERY, the latest movie to be adapted from a book of his, a popular romance novelist gets in a car wreck, and is brutalized by his "Number One Fan" until he agrees to write the book that she wants him to write.
The opening scene has Paul Sheldon (played by James Caan), America's most popular author of dimestore romance books, finishing a new book, which he has yet to title. We see him sitting at his typewriter in a cabin in the woods, typing the final sentence of this new book. He obviously is proud of himself for writing this novel. We can see a lone cigarette, a single kitchen match, and a bottle of champagne sitting not 20 feet away from him, and he gladly partakes of this after penciling "THE END" on the last page of his manuscript. He takes this manuscript, puts it in an old leather case, and drives off. Unfortunately, it is snowing quite heavily, and his car goes off the road. Fortunately (or so it seems at the time), a rescuer comes and pries him out of the wreckage.
What follows is not a horror movie. Not really. What we have is closer to a comedic treatment of a horror movie, rather like WHEN HARRY MET SALLY meets THE SHINING.
Sheldon's "Number One Fan," played by Kathy Bates, turns out to be a nurse who loves his books - specifically, the only series that he has written for the last 20 years, a series with a character named Misery Chastain. (Sheldon, sick of writing romance fiction, had decided to kill of the character in the next book, which was about to be released.) But she is also somewhat of an obsessive - when she finishes the book containing Misery's death, she calls Sheldon a "murderer" and leaves, obviously extremely angry.
Calming down, she tells him that nobody knows that he's with her, that everybody thinks that he's dead. And with his legs burdened with multiple fractures, he cannot walk. So she forces him to write a new Misery book - one that brings her back to life. She forces him to burn the manuscript of the book he had just finished, which was evidently his attempt at writing serious fiction.
In the process of forcing Sheldon to write a new Misery book, she mutilates, cripples, and drugs him, all the while telling him "I feed you, clean you, dress you - and still no appreciation for me!"
Director Rob Reiner does an excellent job of accenting the humor that was probably very scarce in the original book - a feat which he also achieved with STAND BY ME. There are few actual scenes of horror throughout the movie, merely one or two quite painful scenes that make you shudder with pain along with the characters.
The acting is also excellent - Kathy Bates makes her character of the maniacal nurse from hell quite believable, and also makes quite evident the unstated fact in the movie that her character was a graduate of Catholic school. James Caan, while having a very thankless role, is able to go from the usual big, tough guys with a soft spot that he usually plays, to this quiet, superstitious, gentle writer who has to get tough in order to survive with this woman.
Complaints: Just how Caan's character gets out of his situation is never made quite clear - we are shown one gut-wrenching scene, and then see him far removed from it a minute later. Frances Sternhagen, who plays a deputy in the small town where this takes place, appears to be nothing but a wasted role.
But this is really nitpicking - the main hate/hate relationship between Bates and Caan are what count here, and Reiner pulls it off very smoothly.
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