MISERY
With James Caan, Kathy Bates, Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen, and Lauren Bacall.
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Misery, a psychological horror thriller adapted by William Goldman from a Stephen King novel and directed by Rob Reiner, lacks the scope, nuance, and self-awareness of The King of Comedy. But most of what makes it interesting, beyond its relative success as a pared-down genre exercise, is its exploitation of similar feelings about stars and fans. The fact that King’s own fiction often seems motored on self-hatred–particularly when his heroes are writers, as in The Shining and here–probably helps to seal this connection, and suggests as well that King’s self-hatred, like Woody Allen’s, has a lot to do with his popularity. King’s writers and Allen’s heroes are typically frustrated, twisted, and self-deprecating about their talents in spite of their self-absorption. (It was only when Allen owned up to his hatred for his own fans as well as himself, in Stardust Memories, that he risked losing his audience.)
In counterpoint to this claustrophobic plot, we periodically cut away to the efforts of Sheldon’s New York agent (Lauren Bacall) to locate him, mainly through the services of a local sheriff and chief of police in Colorado (Richard Farnsworth). There’s a lot of pleasant homespun humor in the sarcastic, affectionate repartee between the sheriff and his wife (Frances Sternhagen)–a couple who don’t exist in King’s novel–and their function here appears to be to provide some relief from the main story and to present an upbeat model of male-female relations. (There may also be a certain carryover here from the footage of elderly married couples recalling their initial courtships in Rob Reiner’s previous directorial effort, When Harry Met Sally . . .)
Indeed, the major point of both novel and film seems to be that Sheldon is a “winner” and Wilkes is a “loser,” and that their status as winner or loser determines whether or not we like them. (This cynical worldview is surprisingly close to Woody Allen’s.) Therefore we’re expected to laugh at and feel superior to Wilkes’s treasured collection of Liberace records, her use of Spam in meat loaf, and her mispronunciation of “Dom Perignon,” while we’re supposed to be solemn and respectful about Sheldon’s cornball ritual of smoking one cigarette and drinking a glass of champagne after the completion of each book, which the movie presents as hip and suave, the way stars are supposed to behave. And presumably Wilkes’s crime in loving the Misery books can’t be equated with Sheldon’s crime in writing them, because at least he makes money for what he does. In short, the snobbish impulses that this movie repeatedly relies on are never allowed to apply to Sheldon, even though the novel–which I’ve only sampled–at least intermittently suggests that there may be more of Sheldon’s “true self” in the Misery books than he cares to admit.
