By: Nermin Yusr
One year after it was published, Stephen King’s Misery won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1988; driven by his excitement, director Rob Reiner spared no time to make a film based on the novel with the same title, and it was screened in cinemas in 1990.
The film takes you on the same journey as the novel, where the protagonist Paul Sheldon, played by James Caan, gets into a car accident, leaving him with a broken leg. There, one of his fans who is obsessed with his work, Annie Wilkes, played by Kathy Bates, finds him lying in the middle of the road, rescues him, and takes care of him with the utmost gratitude and happiness as she is a fan of his novels’ character, Misery.
Anger takes over Annie when she learns that Paul has decided to kill off the character to start writing about others, making her take a dark turn as she holds him captive and threatens to harm him if he does not change the ending of the book and give Misery a new life in his upcoming novels. While Annie tries to push him to
change the events of his novel, Paul’s publisher continues searching for him with the police, as Paul is believed to have died in the devastating car accident, but of course, his body was not found yet.
While the search for Paul is ongoing, he faces physical and psychological torture in Annie’s house, who has tied him up, imprisoned him, and sat in front of him with a knife and hammer as he changed the ending of the novel.
Kathy Bates, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role in 1990 and whose role was described by international critics as the best embodiment of a villain in the history of American cinema ever, excelled in playing her complex role with a great mastery that makes the viewer believe her, and feel pity for the writer’s helpless condition. It is possible that the tyranny of Kathy’s character in the film and her powerful performance was the reason why we felt that James Caan’s character was weak, even though he is known for playing the “tough guy” since his role in the world’s most famous cinematic epic, The Godfather, in which he played Santino Corleone, as well as Colton in Bulletproof, but it is clear that playing Paul required this much vulnerability and a sense of alienation, loneliness, and danger from his jailer.
Director Rob Reiner excelled in portraying the room from smooth angles that highlight the feeling of tension that pervades the viewer, in addition to his success in conveying Stephen King’s ideas to the screen distinctively and elaborately. He did not violate the rhythm of the literary narrative in the novel but rather created a cinematic approach for which he won the well-deserved Saturn Award presented by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films in 1992.