Misery (film)
From AwardAnnals
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| Director(s) | Rob Reiner |
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| Distributor | MGM (Video & DVD) |
| Honors | |
| Based on the chilling bestseller by Stephen King, Misery was brought to the screen by director Rob Reiner as one of the most effective thrillers of the 1990s. From a brilliant adaptation by screenwriter William Goldman, Reiner turned King’s cautionary tale of fame and idolatry into a mainstream masterpiece of escalating suspense, translating King’s own experience with obsessive fans into a frightening tale of entrapment and psychotic behavior. Kathy Bates deservedly won an Academy Award for her performance as Annie Wilkes, an unbalanced devotee of romance… | |
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Based on the chilling bestseller by Stephen King, Misery was brought to the screen by director Rob Reiner as one of the most effective thrillers of the 1990s. From a brilliant adaptation by screenwriter William Goldman, Reiner turned King’s cautionary tale of fame and idolatry into a mainstream masterpiece of escalating suspense, translating King’s own experience with obsessive fans into a frightening tale of entrapment and psychotic behavior. Kathy Bates deservedly won an Academy Award for her performance as Annie Wilkes, an unbalanced devotee of romance novels written by Paul Sheldon (James Caan), whose books provide Annie with a much-needed escape from her pathetic life and her secret, violent past. After Annie rescues the injured Sheldon from a car accident, she seizes the opportunity to nurse her favorite writer back to health, but her tender loving care soon turns to terrorism as she demands that Sheldon write his latest novel according to her wish-fulfillment fantasies. From this point forward, Misery percolates to a boil as equal parts mystery, thriller, and cleverly dark comedy, with the helpless author pitched in deadly warfare against his number one fan. While Bates carefully modulates her role from doting kindness to sympathetic loneliness and finally to horrifying ferocity, Caan is equally superb as the celebrated author who must literally write for his life. It’s essentially a two-actor film, but Richard Farnsworth and Lauren Bacall are excellent in supporting roles as they investigate the writer’s mysterious disappearance. Frightening, funny, and totally irresistible, Misery was such a hit that some of Bates’s dialogue entered the popular lexicon (particularly her nagging reference to Caan as “Mister Man”), and its nail-biting thrills remain timelessly intense. —Jeff Shannon
Barnes and Noble
Horror novelist Stephen King often tells the story of how he once took a picture with a fan whom he learned was Mark David Chapman, after Chapman had murdered John Lennon. It is that very kind of celebrity anxiety that fuels the film Misery, based on King’s novel. James Caan plays Paul Sheldon, a romance novelist injured in a bone-breaking car wreck in the middle of nowhere and rescued by nurse Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates, in her Oscar-winning breakthrough role). For better and for worse, Annie happens to be Sheldon’s “number one fan,” and she turns from motherly rescuer to sadistic captor after learning that Sheldon will kill off her favorite character, Misery, in his next book. Director Rob Reiner, in his second King adaptation (Stand By Me), explores both the horror and the humanity in Bates’s tragically deranged nurse, who is torn between her compulsions to nurture and destroy. William Goldman’s script is sublime storytelling in what is essentially a one-location, two-character tale, both of whom by the end have brutally blurred the lines between insanity and the struggle for survival. Although slightly tamer than King’s novel, Misery never once fails to shock, scare, or disturb. Tony Nigro
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Related works
A writer is held hostage by his number-one fan in the novel that “demand[s] that we take King seriously as a writer with a deeply felt understanding of human psychology” (Publishers Weekly). His deeply felt understanding of what terrifies us doesn’t hurt either.
