I was a big Stephen King fan once upon a time, but at a certain point, I stopped reading his books. Likewise, I didn’t see many of the movies based on his work because they were usually rated R and I was permitted to see many of them growing up. And when I finally did get permission to see R-rated movies, they tended to be action movies. Even a fairly down-to-Earth psychological thriller like Misery wasn’t going to be something I checked out, particularly since I didn’t care for horror movies much anyway.
Well, today is a different story, and I have been curious about the movie for quite some time. Who can forget the ads showing Kathy Bates holding up that sledgehammer? Probably for the best for James Caan’s character: in the novel, she uses an axe.
Paul Sheldon (Caan) is a successful romance novelist who just finished a new book in a new genre. He wants to get away from the series that made him famous, but his trip away from the remote lodge where he writes his books is far from uneventful. A bad blizzard forces his car off the road, flipping it over and leaving him badly injured. Fortunately, he’s found by former nurse Annie Wilkes (Bates in the role that won her an Oscar), and Annie is Paul’s biggest fan.
It doesn’t take long to see the generally sweet, adverse to swearing Annie is a bit unhinged. Paul had killed Misery off in his last book, and the new book has a lot of swearing in it that she doesn’t care for at all. The only thing to do is get Paul to write a new Misery novel, and she has ways of making him do so, particularly since his injuries leave him at her mercy anyway. Even before she uses a sledgehammer to break his ankles (again, in the book she uses an axe to severe one of his feet), Annie has already locked him in a room, tied him down, forced him to burn the new book he just finished, and basically shout, cajole, and threaten Paul into finishing a book just for her.
This was a nicely-paced movie from director Rob Reiner (whatever happened to him anyway?). Caan plays the helpless main character well. It’s a low-key performance, different from what most people might expect from Caan, of a man just trying to stay one step ahead of a woman who could kill him at any moment. He’s not exactly in the best of physical shape right now, and he doesn’t seem like someone who has ever had to physically defend himself in his life anyway. Richard Farnsworth and Frances Sternhagen pop up now and again as the small town sheriff and his wife, respectively, who bicker a bit like a long-married couple would as he puts the clues together to maybe find Paul before it’s too late.
But the real stand-out here is obviously Kathy Bates. Her Annie is so disarmingly sweet when we first see her with the nonsense words she uses to avoid swearing and her gosh-golly-gee-whiz attitude. It’s all a front, of course, but it’s easy to see why Paul falls for it. And then when things don’t go her way and she starts shouting, still using the nonsense words to avoid swearing, and then cheerfully brandishing a knife or, yes, the sledgehammer, she brings out a different-than-expected form of cinematic psychosis. Yes, there’s a lot of cliche there, but it’s not hard to see why Annie Wilkes flew under the radar even as bodies piled up around her. She’s about the least threatening-looking murderer there could possibly be, and even though there’s some triumph in Paul’s eventual escape from this woman, it still comes down to a short, middle-aged woman who seems to smile all the time and speak in platitudes somehow being a killer. That took some skill, and that alone was worth the price of admission.
Grade: B
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