Misery
Article by Jonno Blood
You could feel the decade changing. I mean, we were still wearing fluoro t-shirts and acid wash jeans, but new anthemic music was coming out of Seattle and Seinfeld was on the telly.
Yeah, 1990 was a great year. The bombs hadn't dropped and fifteen wasn't too old to ride your bike over to the Apex Milk Bar to play Double Dragon with your mates. And best of all, not one but two of my favourite author’s novels were released as Films that year: The author was Stephen King, and the movies were It and Misery. Both were good but Misery was undoubtably the better adaption. It captured all the phycological horror of King’s tome. Sure, it couldn't quite plumb the depths of character development and internal monologue that King is the lord of (that would have required a thumpingly long cut, that only number one fans could endure), but having read the novel I could fill in the blanks.
I could taste the ‘dreadful mixed stench of vanilla cookies and chocolate ice-cream and chicken gravy and peanut-butter fudge’ as Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) forced resuscitative breath into best-selling author Paul Sheldon (James Caan), after he stacked his car in a Colorado blizzard. I could shade in some of the inner turmoil behind Sheldon’s face once he realises Wilkes has him captive, bed-ridden with gelatine legs (literally for some scenes) and is more than a little unhinged.
Wilkes is Sheldon’s number one fan, and the joy she feels at getting to read his latest, yet to be published, manuscript curdles when she finds he has killed off her favourite character, Misery Chastaine. She really lets go of the reins of sanity, jumping from sickeningly wholesome to cock-a-doody psycho quicker than you can say ‘Pig-feed’.
And from there she spirals down into the truly twisted as she oscillates between adulation to soulless cruelty.
Kathy Bates’ rendition of Annie Wilkes is still the yardstick for the bipolar psychotic villain. A little-known theatre actress prior to the gig, she won the Oscar for best actress that year, also pocketing a Golden Globe. Quite simply she smashed it out of the park.
Apparently, first grabs for the role went to Bette Midler who turned it down because it was ‘too violent.’ Thank Goodness for Midler’s morals.
Likewise, James Caan was something of a last resort. Sheldon was offered to Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman, Kelvin Kline, William Hurt, Al Pacino, and Michael Douglas. All said no. Hurt said no twice.
Robert De Niro opposite Bette Midler would have been a very different film:
'You talkin' to me?'
Nope, Caan was a solid choice in the end. He does a decent job of cognitively tiptoeing around the mood swings and ultimatums of Wilkes, as she grows increasingly bat-shit. And Bates simply is Annie Wilkes. She owns the role so completely that when I read the book nowadays, she is the character I see. I don’t know who I saw before, but it sure as shit wasn’t Bette Midler.
For King, Annie Wilkes was a metaphor for the cocaine that had held him hostage in the eighties, and the dirty bird got into Bate’s portrayal so hard that during shooting of the fight sequence he reportedly yelled ‘Watch out. She’s got a gun!’
Sheldon’s attempt to escape Wilkes’s special brand of love results in one of the most memorable moments of the film. The infamous hobbling scene, in which Annie breaks both of Sheldon’s ankles with a sledgehammer to keep him incapacitated still makes me squirm. In the book she cuts of one of his feet with an axe. I’m not sure which is worse but it took director, George Roy Hill’s resignation to convince screenwriter William Goldman to tweak the axe scene in favour of a much more serene sledgehammer. Rob Reiner took over the directing gig. In the scene Sheldon’s legs are actually made of gelatine, but man it looks real.
I still think about it, once in a while.