I was watching the sequel to This is Spinal Tap when I read the news that Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle Singer, were fatally stabbed allegedly by their son, Nick.
It’s horrible and Reiner was a major pioneer in both TV and movies, making mockumentaries so popular that they’re everywhere now. He had been mostly known for comedies. But in 1990, he surprised everyone with one of the best thrillers of all time.
Before Zach Cregger, Jordan Peele and Kevin Smith made the switch from comedy to horror, Reiner did that with Misery. For the most part, it is a very savage book and Stephen King had intended the novel to be published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. That was before the facade had been make public.
Dean Koontz wrote under pen names. Many writers did whenever they wanted to switch genres. But Bachman’s books were different. And Misery King said came from a dream of a woman using a writer’s human skin for the book cover. The book isn’t that bad but Annie Wilkes does a lot of nasty things.
Imagine a cross between Nurse Mildred Ratched and the Marquis de Sade. But Kathy Bates’ performance makes her a cross between Ratched and Mary Poppins. Originally Bette Midler had been approached to play the role but luckily, she turned it down finding the character to violent and disturbing. And it’s a good thing.
Midler is wrong for the role. She had just made the dramedy Beaches and had two popular songs “Wind Beneath My Wings” and a cover of “From a Distance.” No way would audiences buy her routine as a maddening woman. Bates had been a character actor for the most of her career. So, she’s mostly unknown to a lot of audiences who wouldn’t easily recognize her at the time. She had played Jessica Lange’s snobby boss in Men Don’t Leave released earlier that year and a blink-and-miss role in the star-studded Dick Tracy.
So, she goes into this movie second billing behind James Caan. Also, her appearance does a lot for her transformation as a kindly simple woman who can easily go off the rails with the right trigger. This is why you need a director who knows how to handle comedy and light-hearted fare. Reiner said he was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock who often carried thrills with some playfulness in his movie. (Take the scene in Frenzy when the killer is on a potato truck trying to search through sacks for a piece of evidence that will implicate him. We want him to find it in time even though he’s a scumbag.)
I previously did a post on this movie over four years ago when I mentioned that Annie suffers from both Hero Complex and Munchausen by Proxy. Set in an isolated farmhouse in the Colorado Rockies during the winter months, Annie has a checkered past. She was charged and tried with the death of many children at a hospital in Boulder, Colo. However, she was acquitted.
In the book, she had more skeletons in her closet. It’s never really revealed what she did. It’s not really needed. Even by 1980s standards, Annie seems a bit out of place for rural Colorado and thus is an outsider even in her own community. She’s very religious but doesn’t talk a lot about God or Jesus. She never swears, using words like “cock-a-doodie” and calling Caan’s Paul Sheldon “Mr. Man” when she’s mad at him. I would say she has a bipolar disorder and maybe suffers from trauma in her youth.
Her clothing attire is very modest and conservative. She might not have been able to have a child with her husband. Or it was her husband’s divorce that led to her to kill the children. I’ve heard some mothers will wake their babies up so they can nurse them. Annie saves Paul from a car accident that probably would’ve left him freezing to death and possibly killed by ravagers.
But if she notifies the local sheriff Buster (Richard Farnsworth), she’ll lose Paul. Around this time, people were getting more aware of stalkers. Annie tells Paul she went to the Cedar Creek Lodge where he was writing a book and would sit outside. Misery was released in theaters a good year after the murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer by a stalker. The attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley Jr. made stalking more of a public topic coming a few months after the murder of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman.
Hinckley was obsessed with actress Jodie Foster and had reportedly seen Taxi Driver, which she co-starred in, many times. The movie’s director Martin Scorsese has admitted he got letters believed to be from Hinckley criticizing him for portraying Foster as a teen prostitute.
Annie’s trigger is the death of Misery Chastain, the protagonist of a set of books written by Paul. They’re basically romance novels set in the Victorian era from the sound of them. The movie never goes into as much detail as the book on which the movie is based. This works thanks to the script by William Goldman. It would be too much of a distraction.
What’s crucial to the movie is the feeling of isolation and claustrophobia Paul must feel. He’s helpless because his legs are broken and he’s confided to a wheelchair. Caan might not have seemed like the best choice as he was known for playing tough guys. But here I think it works the same way Clint Eastwood is mostly reacting to Jessica Walter’s craziness in Play Misty With Me.
He might be a tough guy who drives a later model Ford Mustang, but with broken legs and a bad arm, he’s as helpless as a baby. He has to be shaven and even use a bottle to urinate in. He’s also kind of humiliated having to do this in front of Annie.
As I noted in the previous posts, there’s almost something boyish and sheepish about how Paul sits in the office of his agent played by Lauren Becall. He’s sunk a little into the sofa half-way hugging a satchel that’s resting on his lap as she stands over it. In the book, Paul was a boozer and chronic smoker. Here, he’s seem more like a man more aware of his mortality and wanted to leave more than genre novels as his legacy.
At first he seems to tolerate Annie’s behavior as rural pleasantries. But he’s unaware that Annie is also suffering from abandonment issues which explains her refusal to even contact authorities when the roads are cleared. She sees this as a sign that she, and she alone, can take care of Paul.
That’s why when Paul begins to heal as the weather gets warmer, she gets depressed knowing he’s going to leave. But after she discovers he’s been getting out of the room she has him locked in at night, she breaks his ankles during through hobbling.
This is one of the most terrifying scenes as it’s shown from Paul’s point of view as Liberace plays Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” Paul, strapped to the bed, pleads for Annie to stop. And as we see Annie place a wood block between his ankles and then hold up a sledgehammer, we know what’s coming and it’s bad. The special effects team actually made fake legs out of gelatin and PVC pipe.
They even let Bates use a real sledgehammer and you can tell in how she uses her own strength to wield so it’s natural. But when we see the real foot move in ways foots are not meant to move, it’s one of the most horrifying scenes ever. It’s also accomplished with no blood or gore. In the book, Annie cuts off Paul’s foot with an axe and cauterizes it. I think I read somewhere that even though they filmed Annie hitting both fake feet, they only used it when she hit his left foot first because they were sure a lot of people would’ve already closed their eyes in terror of seeing. So, why include a shot in the final cut that people aren’t going to see anyway.
Since the movie has come out, Bates carrier has soared. But it also gave rise to a foolish way people take fictional stuff too seriously. Now, it seems pop culture is constantly used in movies and TV shows. After the final season of Game of Thrones, fans tried to get the season remade. George Carlin once criticized the idea of Mickey Mouse’s birthday being announced as it’s real news.
But I think the movie strikes a nerve by showing how some people can’t distinguish reality from make-believe. We’ve seen it more and more with politics and the explosion of AI in the last few years.
Even though he plays a fake director name Marty DiBergi in Spinal Tap, Reiner said people came up to him after seeing the movie and said he should try to do a documentary on a more popular band next.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 