Remembering Rob Reiner: Misery

Welcome to the only remaining of my two bi-monthly 2026 series appreciating the career of Rob Reiner in the wake of his passing. The other series, devoted to the films of his I haven't seen, was cut short by the lack of availability of one film and the lack of an expected release of the other. This series, which reviews six of my favorite Reiner films, still continues and still has one final entry in December.

The ability to watch Misery, Rob Reiner's only horror movie, during the month of Halloween cause me to scramble a few things about the chronology of this series. Given what happened to the other series, as you just read in my italicized intro, a scrambled chronology is the least of our worries.

Only two things about that:

1) Because it is set in a wintry Colorado, the movie makes me think more about winter than it makes me think about Halloween;

2) I'm not sure it's actually a horror movie, really. 

Because Misery was written by Stephen King, we easily lump it into the category of horror. Horrifying things happen in it, to be sure. But as I was watching it this time, I wasn't getting the horror vibe from it I thought I'd get. In fact, with the wintry setting, the vibe might have been more similar to another wintry classic from the 1990s I watched earlier this month, Fargo, especially with the similar role and similar  folksy vibe of the small-town police officer bringing himself too close to danger. Unlike Marge Gunderson, though, Richard Farnsworth's Buster does not emerge from the experience unscathed.

Of course, whether or not it's a horror -- which it certainly is in the most obvious forms of its categorization -- has nothing to do with the quality of the movie. Which I still found to be quite high, unsurprisingly, in this, my first viewing in almost exactly ten years. 

It's certainly more of a horror movie than the first King adaptation Reiner directed, Stand by Me, which I also watched for this series back in June. Although Mike Flanagan has lately taken huge strides in making himself the preeminent King adapter, at least in terms of quantity -- it might be too much, really -- guys like Reiner and Frank Darabont were who we associated with King for a while there. 

I was reminded that this is also a script by the great William Goldman, which is one of the reasons it's so good.

Another major reason, so obvious it's barely with stating: the yin and yang performances of Kathy Bates and James Caan in the primary roles. Since Bates won an Oscar for this performance, let's take her second and start out with Caan.

How understated is this actor? Caan obviously had some showy roles in his career, such as The Godfather, but let's credit both Caan and Reiner for the way he underplays Paul Sheldon. As we might expect from a writer with a keen intellect, Paul always clocks exactly what he's up against in Annie Wilkes, even before he discovers she was responsible for actual murders in the past. There is, in fact, some amount of trial and error in the way he tries to manipulate her, but none of it involves histrionics of any sort. With certain types of psychos, you know raging at them will be wasted energy, and will worsen your situation significantly. We believe that he is ultimately able to manipulate her to the extent that he is because he hasn't frittered away too much good will on false avenues that were never likely to bear fruit. Paul experiences tremendous loss in this film, and not just the use of his feet when Annie hobbles him. As a person who is obsessed with making backups of my data, I am most impacted by the burning of his sole copy of the book that may be the best he's ever written. But even in this scene, he doesn't resort to naked pleading, and there's only a single line of dialogue in which he tries to appeal to her better nature. He knows this effort is likely to fail, and the harder he tries, the more likely it is to fail. Instead we just see, in small adjustments of his expression, what the stakes are for him, and the new levels of despair to which he's sunk.

What's so incredible about Bates' performance is how far off the reservation she's willing to go. She is the opposite of Paul in that she's constantly going big -- big happy emotion, big angry emotion, big sad emotion. The big sad emotion is perhaps the scariest, even more than the yelling and the brandishing of furniture, because this is one form of bigness that's underplayed, if that makes any sense. We think of it as "big" because it's such a shift from her prior demeanors, but it has a certain suicidal deadness, perhaps the most determined of any emotion she shows in its utter inability to be negotiated. But what I really enjoy about Bates here is how weird she's willing to be, like when she scrambles around the room, oinking like a pig. There's zero vanity in this role, and that's what Academy voters recognized when they honored her with an Oscar. She was giving us a real person -- a scary, incredibly unhinged real person, but a person who struck us as so real because of her complete psychological profile. We believe she would imprison her favorite writer in her house, making it up as she goes along, because despite her ability to see the next move in how to keep him here and avoid discovery, her long game is flawed, incomplete, and likely to end in disaster for the both of them. Just as it would be for most normal people in this situation -- or maybe I should say most "real" people, because Annie Wilkes is not normal.

What makes their final brutal fight, complete with eye-gouging and screaming and the use of any available objects, so cathartic is that we finally get a reversal not only of their power dynamics, but of their personas. Paul finally lets loose in a way he knows there's no coming back from, and Annie has finally left herself open to attack. It's a really satisfying climax for the film.

One thing I wanted to say about Goldman's script, that I find very interesting, is that it contains no family for Paul Sheldon -- not even any whiff of a backstory related to a family. It's one of the things that keeps the script so clean and focused. Today, there would be a daughter or an estranged wife looking for him, and maybe that person would even be imperiled in the climax. Goldman didn't see any need for that. We don't have to have maximum empathy for this man in the form of a family who would suffer from his loss. It should be enough that he's in a terrible situation that he doesn't deserve, even if he's a bit of a prick, and may not be the kind of person who treats people with the right amount of delicacy or deference. And Goldman was right to think this because Misery doesn't need it. 

In terms of Reiner's contributions, Misery is pretty dissimilar to anything he'd made previously or would make again. It may be the best example of how Reiner was, at his core, an extremely competent technician, maybe not possessed of a particular look or filmmaking flourishes, but just an excellent studio director capable of turning out a tight and exciting finished product. Misery is that and then some.

I'm hoping I'll wrap up this series with The Sure Thing in December, but you may recall that this was supposed to be the movie I watched way back in February, when I had hoped to go in chronological order for this particular incarnation of the bi-monthly series. When I couldn't do that, I then started to go in order of the films' rankings on Flickchart, but I ultimately threw that out too. I think I might have a lead on getting a copy of The Sure Thing, but if I can't, there are other options. I won't let this series flicker out like the other one did, anyway.