You can love a film without, apparently, ever having paid full attention to it. I realised this only recently when I came to understood something crucial about Misery, the 1990 psychological horror film adapted from the novel by Stephen King and directed by Rob Reiner. What are the chances, I used to think, that Paul Sheldon, the bestselling novelist kidnapped and tortured by unhinged superfan Annie Wilkes, came off the road right when she happened along? It didn’t occur to me that the reason she was there in the first place was because she was stalking him or even (a conclusion not supported by the text) that she caused the crash. You think and think about these films that you love – and they come up different every time.
Reiner’s main strength as a film-maker is what made news of his death particularly horrifying, which is to say the man’s warmth – a sense, widely felt by millions who knew him only through his movies, that at heart, and in an industry not exactly known for it, Reiner was an exceptionally nice guy. His movies were smart, sophisticated, knowing, but when I think about the hits he had across every genre, the defining characteristic for me is their absence of cynicism.
It is a hard tone to hit, particularly with the comedies – to be sharp without being brittle; sardonic without tipping into hollowness or empty sarcasm, or on the flip side into sentimentality – and every one of his movies had it. Even Misery, which was about as far from Reiner’s signature movie, When Harry Met Sally, as you can get.
I would call this tone New York camp if that didn’t conjure too pantomime an image. But effectively, that’s what it was. Reiner was born in the Bronx, the son of Hollywood great Carl Reiner, whose own parents were first-generation Jewish immigrants from Europe and raised their son in the city to join the last remnants of a scene that had started a quarter of a century earlier with Yip Harburg and Irving Berlin.
This is the world Rob Reiner inherited and, seemingly without trying, he put the force of Hollywood history into everything he touched. With Misery, a rare foray by the director into horror, he was too much of a showman to make a straight-up fright film, and the key to the movie’s beloved status – apart from the terrifying premise, the strength of the source material, William Goldman’s script, and looming, brilliant Kathy Bates – is the underbrush of Reiner’s sensibility.
You can list the things that contribute to this sense of Misery being a Reiner film: Bates’s slight falsetto and her maniacal girlishness; James Caan’s rugged incredulity; the presence of Lauren Bacall – of course Lauren Bacall! – as the agent in New York; lovely Richard Farnsworth as Sheriff Buster; the line “Misery Chastain cannot be dead!”, which has travelled almost as widely as “No wire hangers – ever!”
The movie runs like an echo to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and works for similar reasons, with a relish for the grotesque matched only by Reiner’s directorial relish for his leading lady. There’s an abundance to the film that, despite the fact it works hard to make us scream, one thinks of today in connection with Reiner as an expression of joy – as thrilling, funny and generous as the man who made it.
