Entry #1: Misery
Like I said in my piece on The Spool for Stand by Me, the best Stephen King movie adaptations tend to be the ones adapting smaller-scale material. When these films try to adapt expansive Stephen King tomes like The Dark Tower or lean heavily on convoluted scares rather than actual people like the new Pet Sematary, these films stumble badly. But when Stephen King film adaptations just focus on easily-explainable scenarios and grounded intense human dynamics, you get gold. The latter case informs Misery, which has a basic premise that could easily happen in reality and turns small tasks, like getting to a door, into monumental obstacles. If you ever needed proof how the more restrained King works make for the best movies, Misery is it.
Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is a prolific author headed off to a conference when he's stricken by tragedy. During a snowstorm, his car careens off the road, heads down a steep fall and crashes into the snow. By all reasonable expectations, Sheldon should be a goner, but he's saved by a woman named Annie Wilkins (Kathy Bates). His savior isn't just a random local, she's the biggest fan ever of Sheldon's books, the Misery series. While nursing him back to health in her isolated house, Wilkins doesn't inform anyone else that she's caring for Paul Sheldon, leading the rest of the world to presume Sheldon is dead. That's the least of his problems, it turns out, since Wilkins is pretty obsessed with Sheldon creating the perfect ending to his Misery books.
The biggest surprise in watching Misery for the first time was discovering how overtly comedic it is, this would totally qualify as a horror/comedy in the tradition of Evil Dead or Ready or Not. Wilkins' innate personality of a violent (and, as we later learn, murderous) person who also refuses to swear and uses a very child-like vocabulary is inherently humorous and likely wouldn't work if play with straight-faced grimness. Other elements of the project, namely Richard Farnsworth showing up as the most Southern Sheriff who was ever a Southern Sheriff, are believable only with the presence of a touch of levity. Filtering this character and this particular situation through a lens of dark comedy turns out to be a perfect move for this production, especially since it leads to some mighty humorous moments like a perfectly-timed middle finger from James Caan.
However, just because it's frequently funny doesn't mean Misery is devoid of tension. Whereas recent Stephen King adaptation It Chapter Two struggled with how its humorous moments kept intruding on the scary moments, Misery strikes a far better balance between these two elements. Thanks to the work of writer William Goldman and a dynamite performance from Kathy Bates, Annie Wilkins is a character who can generate chuckles but who you can totally buy as someone whose a genuine threat to Paul Sheldon. From an early scene where Wilkins becomes wrapped up in her own screed against the ending of movie serials from her childhood, you become unnerved by how clearly unhinged Sheldon's captor is.
Another great way Goldman creates tension in Sheldon's predicament is making each struggle he faces appropriately small-in-scale. With his legs out of commission, just making his way out of his room turns out to be a whole lot of trouble for this captive author and such situations prove to be immensely engrossing. This kind of gripping tension also owes quite a bit to the work of director Rob Reiner and editor Robert Leighton, both of whom know how to make scenes of Sheldon undergoing all kinds of strife to do basic tasks as soaked with tension as possible. A ticking clock sequence that cuts between Sheldon moving around Wilkins' house and Wilkins returning to her humble abode is an especially good showcase for their talents in making Misery such a chilling visual exercise.
The more intimate nature of this production doesn't just open up chances for unique suspense scenes, it also allows the two lead actors of Misery a chance to shine. Much of this film relies heavily on the cat-and-mouse game between James Cann and Kathy Bates and they both excel in these circumstances. This is particularly true of Bates who got a well-deserved Oscar for her thoroughly committed work here that manages to be the best example of how well Misery threads a needle between the humorous and the horrifying. Future Stephen King film adaptations would be wise to take cues from the small-scale nature of the best of these adaptations as well as remember to have on-hand great performances like the one Kathy Bates gives in Misery.
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