After barely surviving a car crash during a blizzard in the mountains of Colorado, famous author Paul Sheldon awakens to find himself in the care of his No. 1 fan. Annie Wilkes is a mountain of a woman, homely, Christian, and a huge admirer of Sheldon. She has something of a shrine in his honor in her living room, and has named her sow Misery, after the lead character of Sheldon's hugely popular but disgustingly commercial pioneer romance novels. She lives alone, and unfortunately due to the storm the two are snowbound in her house, but luckily Annie is--or possibly was--a nurse, and has all of the equipment necessary to keep Paul alive.
At first she seems pleasant enough, a little too conservative and old fashioned for Paul's New York tastes, but who is he to judge when she is caring for him so well? It's only when Annie reads the latest "Misery" novel and finds that at the end she dies in childbirth that Paul learns that Annie is deranged psychopath and that he is being held captive. Unable to move his legs and one of his arms, he finds himself entirely dependent on the whims of a lunatic, and he will remain there until he gets the story right.
Stephen King penned the novel on which this was based about three years before it was made into a film. Annie Wilkes is, in my not so humble opinion, the best character that he has ever written. She is scarier than Cujo, Carrie, Jack Torrence, and Pennywise the Clown, and Misery is the best adaptation of any of his works. This is probably due to the fact that there is nothing supernatural about the material, and is simply a chilling tale of a man who must be spoon-fed by a woman who both loves him and hates him, and someone who has all of the resources and the mental disconnect to kill him.
I assume the character is not so far off from a fan of King's, and is simply blown into an imaginary nightmare of a situation; this is probably very real for him. Where he goes right in this story is developing a person who, when not torturing her captive, is slightly pitiable and unwittingly hilarious. Annie likes to use words like "oogie," "dirty birdie," "poo," and "cockadoodie," instead of swears, and when Paul cunningly asks her to have a candlelit dinner with her (so that he might have a chance to drug her drink) she practically faints at the prospect as if she were a schoolgirl being asked to prom by the football captain.
But when she is angry, oh when she is angry she is the most frightening image. Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her performance which was so interesting simply because she was able to make the shift from goofy little nurse, to thunderous maniac who is much smarter than she pretends. It is so obvious how much Bates relished each line that she had, loved the part, and played every emotion with such conviction that one couldn't help but forget that she was acting. It is a part that has the potential to be overdone, but she kept it very much in check, giving it only what it needed (which was ample) but never a drop more.
James Caan played Paul, and was not very good at it. He normally has so much energy on screen, but in this film he seemed so non-committal that he almost bored me. I do not mean that he should have done so much as to upstage Bates, but he should have done enough to at least seem interested in what he was doing. Dialing it up from a 2 to a 4 would have been appreciated.
There are certainly moments when the movie lags, and many times when the film is not particularly inspired, but it is still a very solid adaptation. There are enough scenes--usually when Bates is left to do what she does--that the film really works on a gut level. Take, for example, the scene when it is raining outside and Annie comes in disheveled and blank-faced. She tells Paul that the rain gives her the blues, and her delivery is so sincere that we almost lose that she is still Annie Wilkes...that is until she pulls out a pistol. It was a perfect bit of acting and one of the powerful portions of the film that made it so scary.
There is so much more about her and her past that I wish was examined. The film is obviously told from the point of view of Sheldon (perhaps of King), but wouldn't it be fascinating to have it done from the point of view of Annie, the Dragon Lady? Perhaps it would be too hard to create a structure based on someone who does many things when her brain simply seems to snap. The things she does don't seem much sense, so I suppose a plot wouldn't either if motives are not immediately apparent. After all, why does the ceramic penguin have to face due south? No reason. It simply does.
3/4
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