MISERY: 4K Blu-ray (Columbia/Castlerock/Nelson Entertainment, 1990) Kino Lorber

I confess to a certain artistic narrow-mindedness and bias. Rob Reiner would not have been my first choice to direct any movie based on a Stephen King novel. I furthermore confide that my apprehensions here have absolutely zero basis in Reiner’s merits or gifts as a director which have since proven formidable, but rather were then firmly set in my first impressions of him as the uber-liberal bane of Carroll O’Connor’s arch-conservative on TV’s All in the Family (1971-79). There – I said it. Evidently, King agreed with me back in 1989…or perhaps simply did not want anyone in Hollywood tampering with what he considered to be his favorite and most closely guarded literary masterwork. Thankfully Reiner didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Nor did he give up on the project, coaxing King into preliminary meetings that revealed a mutual verve for the movie the author eventually embraced. And Reiner has since proven he was exactly the right director for Misery (1990), one of King’s most paralytic and spellbinding psychological melodramas. Misery takes us on a terrorizing spiral into the unraveling mind of a very disturbed middle-age frump – think, Susan Boyle with a few loose spark plugs. In Misery’s case, the house-bound chicklet is one Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates in an Oscar-winning role), the self-professed biggest fan of best-selling author, Paul Sheldon (James Caan). With fans like Annie, who needs critics? For, in the next 114-mins. Annie will save Paul’s life only to make him wish she had let him die out there in the snow after an impromptu blizzard caused his Mustang to careen over the side of a very steep cliff.

Movies about two people essentially talking to one another in a confined space are very cheap to make but exceedingly difficult to pull off without tedium quickly setting in for the audience. In order for everything to click, the director needs but two essentials beyond mere bravery. He needs a killer screenplay with plenty of suspense and pathos, and, actors capable of sustaining scenes in close proximity to one another without the added benefit of being infrequently interrupted by SFX or even a periodic change in scenery to keep the eye focused and mind entertained. In this latter regard, Reiner has been heaven-blessed with the presence of James Caan and particularly Kathy Bates in her breakout role as the unhinged freak with a literary fixation. Caan, who spends three-quarters of our dark and harrowing story strapped to a metal bed or bound in a wheelchair, infrequently to be drugged or have his feet broken at the ankle with a sledgehammer while being mentally tortured by other means, nevertheless makes his presence known and felt. But Bates is the star here – warts and all – her unprepossessing plain Jane looks, a deceptive masquerade that slowly reveals the severity of her extreme melancholia and mental derangement.  Bate’s Annie can – and does – make the skin crawl, the milk curdle and the moon turn blood-red with envy as she maneuvers through Annie’s ever-devolving instability. This pivots on a dime - cheerful and accommodating one minute – raging lunacy, the next. Herein, Annie’s displeasure seems to be dictated by Paul’s decision to kill off Misery Chastain, the fictional character he created and had sustained through a series of wildly popular romance novels.

When Paul’s car accidentally overturned and rolled down the mountainside, he was on his way to Manhattan for a meeting with story editor, Marcia Sindell (Lauren Bacall) on his latest, and final, installment in the Misery franchise - his piece de resistance. Too bad Annie doesn’t feel the same way. A nurse – presumably retired and living obscurely in the woods – Annie dragged Paul to her secluded cabin where she bound his wounds and reset his broken legs. Paul was undeniably repulsed by his first glimpse of those shattered limbs, but rather impressed at how well he had begun to heal – thanks to Annie’s vigilant expertise. That is, until Annie read his as yet unpublished manuscript and realized Misery Chastain was about to die. For Paul, it is a fitting conclusion to a heroine he has nurtured, known, loved, but more recently begun to resent as holding him back from writing the great American novel. After all, his commitment to the Misery books has prevented him from exploring his true craft as a writer in new and alternative ways. But for Annie, Misery’s demise represents an implosion of her entire world – one based in fantasy and dictated by her own precariously perched imagination.  Plunged into a maelstrom of all-consuming mental chaos, Annie forces Paul to burn his manuscript before embarking on a complete rewrite that will resurrect Misery Chastain from the fiery ashes. However, as Paul begins to re-conceptualize his words, working feverishly to finish the rewrite, he becomes more acutely aware Annie will never let him leave her house alive.

The now infamous ‘hobbling’ scene, in which Annie breaks both of Paul’s feet at the ankle with a sledgehammer after he has tried to escape, caused more than a few hysterical winces in theaters back in 1990. I know. I gave out with one of them. But the sequence is actually much more violently realized in King’s novel, with Annie using an axe to partially cleave the foot from its limb. Today, the ‘hobbling’ scene remains a pivotal moment in this bizarre grand guinol. Yet, what is most unsettling of all is Bates’ sustained and subtly nuanced performance to convincingly reveal the utter craziness in her character. Annie’s slow descend into insanity is chillingly real and observantly evil. The audience increasingly fears for Paul’s life while perversely sympathizing with Annie’s inexplicable derangement that – like Paul - has made her a prisoner of Misery Chastain’s celebrity culture. If the movie endures at all – and it decidedly does – it is because of Kathy Bates’ variedly and hauntingly layered psychosis – if only because Bates makes every split of her alter-ego’s psyche all seem so palpably genuine and plausible. When her Annie speaks to Paul under the influence of this increasingly derailed sanity, Bates’ eyes are as lifeless as a shark, her monotone, like the inkling of a great molten vat of lava brewing beneath the surface of a volcano, ready to explode and consume any and everything in its path. Even a remembrance from childhood, going to see a Saturday morning serial, escalates into a stunningly surreal moment of violent disbelief - “He didn’t get out of the cock-a-doody car!”

Misery would have been nothing at all without Bates’ presence and she wields a mighty axe (or sledgehammer, as the case may be), her performance full of some strangely sublime and very off kilter music (apart from her fascination with Liberace) that rots Annie’s mental clarity as it increasingly plucks the audience into a nail-biting, frenzied nightmare. And yet, Misery is not just Kathy Bates, or even James Caan. Rob Reiner illustrates he knows how to direct a movie using nothing more than two or three camera set-ups in some very tight quarters. With the exception of the film’s opening sequence – taking place in a mountain chalet – and the finale – where an emotionally and physically crippled Paul meets Marcia for lunch only to think he suddenly sees Annie approaching them with a pushcart of desserts from across the room – the bulk of our story was shot inside a remote, dark and decidedly unattractive cabin in the snowy woods. Most of the action takes place inside the den Annie has converted to Paul’s bedroom. There’s also a sequence in the even more uninviting basement below where Annie has dragged Paul to hide him from an investigating sheriff, Buster (Richard Farnsworth).  Regrettably, Buster discovers Paul anyway and has his intestines splattered at close range by Annie with a double-gauge shotgun.

Reiner’s attention to pacing is subtle. But he never allows the story to drag. This movie ‘moves’ like a careening car through some dark ride/thrill attraction at the county fair, evoking chills, danger and an ultimately satisfying dénouement to all the carnage gone before it – Annie’s murder, repeatedly struck in the head by Paul using his Underhill typewriter and then left to bleed out on the floor.  There have been a good many Stephen King novels turned into movies with varying degrees of success. And while I am partial to both John Carpenter’s adaptation of King’s Christine as well as Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption, Misery is quite possibly the all-time greatest of the lot.  The story, always solid to begin with, gets a gigantic boost from Bates and Caan. I didn’t think it possible to be royally entertained for nearly 2-hrs. by a repugnant nut-job and her thoroughly scared goat. But there it is. Reiner has given us the goods with a decidedly bone-chilling visualization. The net result – perhaps, is Misery is no longer King’s favorite story…it’s his favorite film. 

Owing to its ever-changing status in rights, Misery has resurfaced on home video multiple times over the decades. In the late 1990’s the dying remnants of Polygram Entertainment, the original holder of the Castlerock/Nelson library, curiously to have been distributed theatrical by Columbia Pictures, released non-anamorphic DVDs under their own banner. When MGM/UA acquired this catalog wholesale it redistributed these same tired elements under their own label. Then, MGM/Fox revisited Misery on Blu-ray, with a stunningly handsome Collector’s Edition. And, apart from several efforts made to repackage it thereafter, this is pretty much the same 1080p transfer to have resurfaced over and over again on home video – even, via Shout! Factory’s reboot in 2017…until now. Kino Lorber’s new 4K UHD of Misery sports a brand new ultra-hi-def transfer with Dolby Vision. The image here is significantly darker than the previous Blu-ray editions, but seeming more indigenous to the theatrical experience, with more subtly nuanced contrast, desaturated colors, and, distinctly cooler skin tones. Unsurprisingly, detail and film grain advance respectively. On the 4K disc, we get a 2.0 DTS stereo and a 5.1 Dolby Surround – sans Atmos. Extras on the 4K disc are limited to 2 previously recorded audio commentaries – the first, from Rob Reiner and a second by caustic screenwriter, William Goldman. Mercifully, Kino has elected to include the standard Blu-ray edition, sporting all the extras a part of the MGM/Fox release. So, included again, the ½ hr. Misery Loves Company, a fascinating 'making of...' with all the major players weighing in on their experiences, the 15-min. Marc Shaiman's Musical Misery Tour on developing the score and no less than 5-featurettes critiquing the art of being a serial stalker/crazy person: Diagnosing Annie Wilkes, Advice for the Stalked, Profile of a Stalker, Celebrity Stalkers, and Anti-Stalking Laws. Lastly, there are two theatrical trailers. Far less about the horror and far more prescient in its psychological profile of an unsuspecting loon on the loose, Misery is a darkly intriguing, unbalanced, and thoroughly enjoyable thriller to have aged exceptionally well with time. Great stuff here, and looking pretty darn spiffy in 4K. Highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

5+

VIDEO/AUDIO

5

EXTRAS

3.5