Halloween Horrors: MISERY

MISERY  (1990)
Directed by Rob Reiner
Starring James Caan, Kathy Bates, Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen, Lauren Bacall
R for unspecified reasons (violence/terror and some language).
SCAREmeter: 7/10
GOREmeter: 6/10
OVERALL: 4 out of 4 stars 

MISERY is the kind of movie that throws the entire psychiatric community up in arms.  It's a highly-effective psychological thriller, showcasing a masterfully-written villain in a "hells-a-poppin'" great performance, who also happens to be a smorgasbord of mental illness, including bipolar disorder, severe personality disorder, sadomasochistic tendencies, paranoia, obsessive-compulsive personality and extended bouts of severe depression.  Annie Wilkes, as played by Kathy Bates, is the crown jewel of an already very good movie, and a searing indictment of obsessive fans.
The film, based on a novel by Stephen King, is the story of pulp novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan), who feels trapped by his enormously successful but maudlin Misery series chronicling the soapy romantic adventures of Misery Chastain.  Having finished what he intends to be the final book in the series, he hopes to then move on to more serious and personal writing, and as the film opens, he has just completed writing his first personal novel at his work retreat in a remote lodge nestled in the snowy Rocky Mountains near the small town of Silver Creek, Colorado.  As he leaves the lodge with the manuscript for Los Angeles, Paul is caught in a blizzard and veers of the icy mountain road.  A local nurse, Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), finds the wreck and takes a badly injured Paul Sheldon to her remote cabin and uses her nurse's training to pop his dislocated shoulder into place and puts splints on his severely broken legs, but his injuries force him to remain in bed.  It turns out that Annie is Paul's number one fan, obsessed with the Misery series on a very unhealthy level.  She's sweeter than sugar most of the time, with a country bumpkin sensibility, but she can shift very suddenly into violent, psychotic tempers, as Paul learns when she finishes the newly-published Misery installment.  Having discovered that Paul has "killed off" Misery Chastain, she flies into a violent temper, and forces him to burn the "profane" and very personal manuscript he was on his way to delivering.  It turns out that Annie never told anyone that Paul is in her cabin, and she now intends to hold him hostage while he writes her a new Misery novel, to properly explain Misery Chastain's return (no cheating allowed) and continue the saga that she is so unhealthily invested in.
The book on which the film is based was one of Stephen King's most personal (being about a novelist and all), and he was initially reluctant to let Hollywood get its hands on it, especially since his novel The Shining was so significantly altered in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 screen translation, but after THIS IS SPINAL TAP-director Rob Reiner's STAND BY ME (1986), an adaptation of King's novella The Body, was met with acclaim, King became more open to the idea.  Reiner, who had just recently finished THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987), written by screenwriting legend William Goldman, adapted from his own novel, tapped Goldman to adapt Misery for the screen.  Goldman elaborates on his writing process for the film in his non-fiction book Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade, making special note of his favorite scene in the book and in his own script, but which never appeared in the final film.
The most famous (or infamous) scene in the film is certainly the "hobbling scene."  After Annie realizes that Paul has been sneaking out of his room and into the rest of the house, she recites an anecdote about a practice used by slave drivers who enslaved the local tribes into mining silver from the mountains many years ago.  When the slaves ran away, their masters couldn't kill them, they were too valuable for that, but they could have them running away again, so they would "hobble" the slaves.  As she explains this, Annie places a plank of wood lengthwise between Paul's legs, fitting tightly, then reveals a sledgehammer.  In one of the most cringe-worthy movie scenes in memory, Annie, with a psychotic affection, swings the hammer at one of Paul's feet from the side, snapping his ankle and foot to a 90-degree angle, and then the other foot.  We only see it done to the first foot, and it's shown so briefly that there's only time enough to process the image, then the second one is audible from offscreen.  In the novel, the "hobbling," apparently a fiction within so specific a context, involves the more extreme act of Annie chopping off one of Paul's feet with an ax, a shocking act of brutality that Goldman admired tremendously, but Reiner insisted that it was too much, and so the ankle-snapping became a defining moment of the film.  Later on, Goldman praised the change as the correct decision, and it's a great example of the "less is more" theory.
Horror has an unsteady reputation, having often been dismissed as morbid and/or sadistic pulp entertainment, and it wasn't until ROSEMARY'S BABY (1969) that a horror film won an Academy Award (Best Supporting Actress, Ruth Gordon; although I think Alfred Hitchcock's Best Picture-winning REBECCA (1940) should qualify), and THE EXORCIST (1973) that one received a Best Picture nomination.  Remarkably, MISERY won one of the major Academy Awards for the best in film in 1990, and the only award which it had been nominated for: Best Actress for Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes, making her the first Best Actress winner for a horror movie, the year before THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS would become the first horror film to win Best Picture.

The face of a killer.

In 2003, the American Film Institute (AFI) named Annie Wilkes as #17 on their Best Villains list for their 100 Years...100 Movies series.  The combination of great writing, talented direction and the greatest performance Kathy Bates has ever given, in her breakout role, make Annie Wilkes one of the most underrated horror movie killers ever, perhaps, ironically, because she hasn't been ruined by successively poor sequels the way that Mike Myers, Freddy Krueger and Leatherface have been (Jason Vorhees sucked from the start, don't even pretend he didn't).  She's another example of King's obvious apprehension towards conservative Christian fanaticism, although far more conservative than Christian, as opposed to Margaret White in CARRIE (1976).  Prior to the violent climax in which she ferociously shouts "c***sucker, her manner of speech is often comically sanitized, even in anger resorting to childish phrases like "cockadoodie," "mister man" and "dirty bird," but when she suddenly shows up at the foot of Paul's bed, calling him a 'dirty bird' for "killing" Misery Chastain, it's more chilling and menacing than funny.  As Paul discovers in her scrapbook, she his an "angel of Death" nurse, who had been arrested years earlier on suspicion of murdering as many as 50 newborns at the hospital where she worked, earning her the nickname "the Dragon Lady."  And yet, as sick as she is, she's also sympathetic; not enough that her she usurps the role of the unsung hero, not by far, but she's easily the most interesting part of the film, and a tragic sort of villain.
Unfortunately for James Caan, Annie is undoubtedly the most interesting character and certainly has far greater opportunities of expression, yet his role of Paul Sheldon is the more difficult by far, bed or chair-bound through nearly the entire film, and working mostly as a reactionary character.  While it isn't as easy to appreciate that kind of role, it's definitely some of the best work of Caan's career as well, expressing the tension and heartbreak of his character.

Richard Farnsworth provides the majority of the comic relief (although there's plenty of dark humor woven throughout) as the wry local sheriff who's looking for the missing writer, never slipping into the easy buffoon territory, and often one step ahead of everyone else, often with witty accents.
It's a great and frightening story with minimal gore, that shows the scary side of the #1 fans, the celebrity-obsessed and ultimate fans who assign unnatural emotional significance to fictional properties, a phenomenon that's become only increasingly more apparent in the internet age as maniacal fanboy/fangirls compete to prove their own superior personal novel of a fiction and react with undue passion toward the artists when the stories take turns that do not align with the fans' "superior knowledge" of the story to the creators'.