Misery
Sometimes there's nothing scarier than your own readers
Directed By: Rob Reiner
Other Notable Films From Reiner: Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…
Starring: Kathy Bates, James Caan, Bunny MacDougal from Sex and the City, and a sledgehammer
Screenplay By: William Goldman, based on the novel by Stephen King
Movie Synopsis: A famous author’s number one fan holds him captive in her home and forces him to write a book
Signature Line: “The operation was called ‘hobbling.’”
THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context
A director can be exceptional in any number of ways. They can have a profound knack for choreographing and stylizing action (like, say, John Woo). Or a unique flair for turning a film’s visual language into a character itself (like, say, Denis Villeneuve). Or a masterful ability to weaponize coolness (Spike Lee), or twists (M. Night Shyamalan), or tension (Kathryn Bigelow), or spectacle (Christopher Nolan), or violence (Martin Scorsese).
The thing that made Rob Reiner singular—the thing that made his work everlasting—was his ability to take the material he was working with, run it through his supercomputer brain, and then present the purest version of it to audiences. And what I mean is:
Let’s say you knew a person who’d never seen any movies. And let’s say you invited that person to your house to show them four movies. And let’s say three of those movies were directed by Quentin Tarantino and the remaining one was directed by literally anybody else on the planet. At the end of the night, it would be very easy for your non-movie watching friend to pick out the non-Tarantino film. Because he has a signature Quentin Tarantino Thing™ he does with his stuff. His fingerprints are purposely all over his work.
Rob Reiner operated differently. He favored an imperceptible touch. It’s what allowed him to move so easily across subjects, and why six of his first seven movies are often regarded as masterworks within their individual genres. Over the opening eight-year stanza of his career, he directed a brilliant comedy (This Is Spinal), a preteen coming-of-age classic (Stand by Me), a timeless fairytale saga (The Princess Bride), a rom-com tentpole (When Harry Met Sally…), and an outstanding legal drama (A Few Good Men).
And tucked there in between those last two—between Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in a deli and Jack Nicholson yelling at Tom Cruise in a military courtroom—sits the most commanding movie in Rob Reiner’s filmography: Misery, a visceral psychological horror starring Kathy Bates, James Caan, and the most unforgettable sledgehammer in Hollywood history.
THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Misery
1:02: James Caan is here. He plays Paul Sheldon, the author of several commercially successful but critically panned romance novels. He wants to move away from what he’s been doing and into more prestigious work, which, I mean, I gotta say: I do not understand this impulse at all. His first novel sold MORE THAN A MILLION COPIES. If I ever wrote anything that sold a million copies, I promise you I would write that exact same book over and over and over again until the bones in my fingers turned to mush, at which point I would learn how to type with my nose.
1:17: Paul has a tradition he follows any time he completes a new book: He (a) drinks some champagne, (b) smokes a single cigarette, and then (c) hand delivers the typewritten manuscript to his agent. It’s the exact same process I have for each time I finish something for GOOD MOVIE. Hannah has been begging me for months to just email her each essay, and I just keep showing up at her door with pages of notes I’ve scribbled onto Taco Bell napkins for her to fix.
6:49: Paul accidentally flipped his car off the road and crashed down into an embankment. Several years ago, there was this big push for Leonardo DiCaprio to win his first Oscar for taking playing the lead in Alejandro Iñáarritu’s snowy epic, The Revenant. I remember watching it all unfold and being like, “What a dumb reason to give someone an Oscar. Big whoop. He had to be cold or whatever.” But then I went to Wyoming a couple years later and snow touched my neck for the first time. Fucking hell, man. It was immediately the worst thing that had ever happened to me. They should’ve given Leo six Oscars for dealing with that bullshit.
Anyway, Paul, who broke both legs and dislocated his shoulder in the crash, was gonna freeze to death in his upside-down car. But Annie (who we’ll meet in a second), crowbar’d the door open, pulled him out, then carried him to safety.
7:20: Kathy Bates is here. She plays Annie Wilkes, Paul Sheldon’s “number one fan” and also a total fucking lunatic. Bates’s performance in this movie is an all-time great. She LORDS over this thing. She’s operating at a level of domination up there with LeBron’s Game 6 of the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals, Tim Duncan’s near-quadruple double to close out the 2003 Finals, and Giannis’s 50-15-6 atomization of the Suns to win Milwaukee’s first championship in half a century. It’s really incredible and really special.
7:21: P.S. It occurs to me right now that this movie basically turns into the saga of a handsome and heroic writer battling an extremely villainous editor, and so I am very excited about all of the ANNIE IS JUST LIKE HANNAH jokes I’m gonna get to make here. None of them will be true, mind you. But I’m excited to make them nonetheless. (Their first names are even almost the same! I might start calling Hannah “Hannie” from now on.)
Ed. note: Uh oh. My family actually does call me Hanni, so as long as we can ditch that criminal-looking “e” at the end, I’ll let that slide. But we’ve definitely gotta cap the number of serial killer comparisons, pal. —Hannah
Understandable, I suppose. How many jokes do I get? I should at least get one joke per baby Annie murdered. Can I do eleven Hannah/Annie jokes? She killed eleven babies. —Shea
Ed. note: ELEVEN?! As in the Millie Bobby Brown character who definitely deserved a better ending?! As in the critical second half of my favorite unit of measurement (fifty-lem)?! Absolutely not. I was thinking more like three. —Hannah
Three?! I’m gonna burn through those so fast. Dang. But okay. Fine. Three it is. Back to the movie… —Shea
9:38: “Your legs just sing grand opera when you move, don’t they?” Annie just said that about the pain that Paul is experiencing because of his two broken legs. I always enjoy that sort of writing—the kind of thing that doesn’t make sense on its face but makes sense in your heart. Raymond Chandler is my favorite author who writes like that. Some lines of his that have been rattling around in my brain for years:
“The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.”
“She looked playful and eager, but not quite herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don’t care much about kittens.”
“She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.”
The greatest to ever do it.
12:12: I don’t know who Lauren Bacall owed a favor to, but I’m glad that person cashed it in to get her to take on this small role as Paul’s agent. A crazy thing to think about: There are basically just five roles in Misery (Annie, Paul, the sheriff, the sheriff’s wife, and Paul’s agent), and four of them are occupied by actors who’ve either won an Oscar (Bates and McCall) or been nominated for one (Caan and Richard Farnsworth, who plays the sheriff). That’s 80 percent of the cast!1
13:36: Annie just confessed to Paul that she knew where he was staying while in town, and that she’d often go sit in the parking lot and look at the window of his room, trying to imagine what he was working on up there. Unfortunately for Paul, he misses out on the creepiness of the statement because she buttressed the statement with compliments about him being the greatest writer on Earth. Writers are such suckers for ego manipulation. You could get a writer to hook himself up to an electric chair and flip the switch himself if you just told him that his writing spoke to you.
18:11: Uh oh. Annie just exploded at Paul for the first time (she’s mad because his new book—the one he was finishing up at the start of the movie—has cursing in it). Two things to mention about this:
The UHHHH WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED??? look that Paul gives after Annie leaves the room is perfect. I think a less confident actor would’ve taken a look at the script and decided he needed to do a bunch of big, dramatic things to make up for the fact his character spends 95 percent of the movie in a bed or a chair. But Caan, who always had a knack for holding the camera’s attention, plays everything subtly. And it was absolutely the right decision to make. And to that point:
Trying to organize the JAMES CAAN MOVIE PODIUM is an impossible task. I mean, the first two picks are set (The Godfather and Thief), but it’s a full-on knife fight for that third position. There’s Misery (my personal pick), Elf (a bonafide Christmas classic), Brian’s Song (I just started crying), The Gambler (I’m still mad at Mark Wahlberg for the remake), Bottle Rocket (very underrated), Rollerball (I’m still mad at Chris Klein for the remake), Funny Lady (shoutout Babs), and A Bridge Too Far (a movie so manly that when I typed the title out just now, some random dad walked into my office and told me I had to go outside to help him reshingle a roof).
19:23: See these two? The guy on the left is Buster. He’s the sheriff in Silver Creek (the small town where the movie is set). The woman on the right is Virginia.2 She’s Buster’s wife. And she’s my favorite ancillary character in this movie. Because while everybody else is caught up in the disappearance of Paul, all she wants to do is fuck. And that’s not a joke or hyperbole. It’s a real thing. (Here, for example, as she drives Buster around so he can scan the roadside or where Paul might’ve skidded off the road, she starts rubbing her hand up his thigh and telling him that they should just go home and get under the covers together.) She’s only in Misery for a handful of scenes, but every time we see her, she’s fussing at Buster like, “Man, who cares about Paul? He’s probably dead anyway. I’m still very much alive, though. So go on and whip that old dick for me, baby.” It’s awesome.
