A Month of Stephen King (fourth week)

As before, I'll be editing in updates to this post as I go.

August 22^nd

The Dark Half (George A. Romero, 1993)

Here's a movie that raises another difficult question when it comes to Stephen King on Film. How broadly do you play the horror elements? I don't just mean camp.

When author Thad Beaumont tries to ditch his more violent pen-name alter ego, George Stark materializes and begins a killing spree.

King's doppleganger story, or his Jeckyll/Hyde tale sprang from his own biography. On a superficial note, King used to write under the pseudonym Richard Bachman until someone caught on. King went public, announcing in press releases that Bachman was “dead”. More substantially, when he wrote as Bachman he tapped into something more violent and hardened in his own psyche. His 'Bachman books are often less pleasant to read, more cynical, angrier. Whether King noticed or not, his wife Tabitha did and told him so. Tabitha, I take it from barely recalled testimony by King, was not a fan of this side of her guy. All of this is in the novel that sprang from that episode.

(An aside: when King describes his characters' physical attributes I tend to take them as suggestions rather than absolutes. Thus, I couldn't help casting King himself as Thad Beaumont when I read the book, and that being the case his badass mofo doppleganger George Stark could only have been played by Glen Danzig.)

While I don't have much to say about the story, I can attest that I adore both the book and the movie. The hardback was a birthday gift to me when it was in first release. I tried to read it slowly, to linger and make it last, but it was too good to put down. Storywise it hits the Jeckyll/Hyde basics...Beaumont's wife advises him to out himself so to speak, which is the right choice, but he misunderstands and instead of owning the more untamed side of his nature he tries to abnegate it entirely, Trying to suppress his own nature, it comes back to bite him in the ass. The harder he tries to kill this essential part of himself, the more of a problem it becomes. None of this is groundbreaking. What I love about the story is the magic realism King spins around it, a mythology at once deeply personal to himself, and oneiric with allusions to psychopomps and the land of the dead. It's a smooth read.

It's also a smooth movie, among the first tier of King adaptations. Sadly, not many share that estimation. It has three strengths, IMO and two weaknesses. First on the plus side is Timothy Hutton giving not one but two distinct performances. As Thad Beaumont he's a pretty standard protagonist, exasperated but stalwart. As Stark, he's a cold bastard who walked right out of a pulp crime novel, all mid-Western drawl and mean self-assurance.

The second and most sublime is Amy Madigan as Thad's wife Liz, maybe the movie's secret weapon. Liz is atypical for a supporting female lead in a horror film, where we'd expect her to be wholly reactionary to the drama and a potential damsel-in-distress to boot. On the contrary, Liz is the anchor that keeps the drama from drifting away on the tide current of phantasmic occurrences. She loves her husband and is steadfast in her support of him despite her misgivings about his darker side. In this too she is a rock, not backing down from his “dark half” (even when literally confronted by it in the corporealized form of Stark) but openly talking to Thad about it. This shows a self-respect on her part and a vital trust in Thad and in their bond. At the story's opening it is Liz who sees clearly enough to give Thad the good advice to own his whole nature – to be an integral whole – and cheat the blackmailer of his prize.

Finally there's the direction of George A. Romero, who gives treads a fine line between between straight drama and dream logic, eschewing most of the accepted cinema language of exaggerated lighting and dutch angles, which I think would have undercut the weight of the story (there is however one hallway scene with strong red and blue gels ala Argento or Bava). Instead the horror comes from a spate of brutal murders committed by George Stark. Time and the genre itself have blunted the violence considerably, these scenes were bloodless at the time and we've seen worse since, but I once found them hard to watch. Romero sets 'em up tense and delivers in swift slashes.

Here's where my initial question comes in, because I think Romero's refusal to play up horror cliches results in a stronger movie and yet even with Romero at the helm it usually doesn't get more than “it's passable” from horror fans. I'm trying to wade my way through this, and don't have anything yet but comparisons to other films. For example, Romero's contribution to the anthology film Two Evil Eyes: based on a story by Edgar Allen Poe, Romero's is universally regarded as the weaker section of the movie for looking like any episode of a low-budget television series. It is utterly devoid of flavor or flair, which makes it unlike The Dark half, but it could be argued to have been born of the same aesthetic choice. Both refuse to punch up the horror with standard cliches, one is IMO effective and the other not, neither is well regarded. Or there's Pet Sematary in which the horror scenes are delivered under a barrage of trite horror riffs and comic relief, IMO undermining the truer horror at the heart of the story and yet enjoying the popularity that has eluded Romero's film (Romero had been slated to direct PS but had to bow out to scheduling conflicts – we can only wonder what his version would have been like). The Dark Half is a somber though not depressing or otherwise overbearing story lacking in comic relief. It deserves a reverent telling and that's what Romero gave it. Was he wrong?  I don't believe there's any clear answer but to honor the needs of the film first, and the source material second.

Possibly detrimental to the movie is the nearly inexplicable failure of the police to arrest Thad Beaumont for crimes which bore his fingerprints (literally – Stark and Beaumont are the same person, after all). King pulls it off in the novel as the chief investigating officer is no less than the Sheriff of Castle Rock, a friend of the Beaumont family who jeopardizes his job to forestall Thad's arrest. Preferential treatment and less-than-proper handling of a case is true to life, yet in fiction we demand more “credible” plotting. In this the script could have used the same care that King gave it, but the crucial dialog that would have let this play are missing. We're also left to wonder exactly how George Stark was conjured from nothing, a mystery to which we are given an anecdote about Thad having ben conceived as a twin and the sibling been not entirely absorbed in thew womb. If you've seen enough horror to accept mystical poesy it isn't a problem, but those who need strict logic may find it a roadblock.

August 23^rd

Secret Window (David Koepp, 2004)

From the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden published in the collection Four Past Midnight. Author Mort Rainey is being hounded by a man named John Shooter claiming that Rainey plagiarized Shooter's own story. Shooter is a scary obsessive who pursues Rainey with his own warped understanding of justice.

A top-shelf production all around, the sole problem with Secret Window is that it comes some two or three decades too late. No spoilers (well, okay, mild spoiler) but you're going to guess where it's going because you've already been there countless times before, and chances are you may be disappointed that such a clever, well-mounted and suspenseful puzzle doesn't lead to something more surprising. I suppose, as they say, it's the journey and not the destination...

I resisted this movie the first couple of times I saw it, and it's not one I take down from the shelf easily. That would be because I'm not overly fond of the story. Still, the more I see it the more I like it. That's not because the story itself is growing on me. Rather, the telling of it is.

Secret Window is written and directed by David Koepp, not one of my favorite screenwriters. He's been involved in a number of box office hits but his work is spotty. At his best he writes charming crowdpleasers without depth (You may want to exclude his one standout, Carlito's Way, not original to Koepp but an adaptation). At worst his scripts are so idiotic as to be borderline offensive (The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2). As a director, Koepp still has less than dozen titles to his filmography, and as yet I've only seen this one. I'll have to get at Stir of Echoes at some point, because on the strength of this one movie he might be a better director than a screenwriter. He maintains a calculated pace that increases in menace incrementally, building our suspicions about what it all means through a judicially placed clues. When Shooter pays his visits, they're staged with a flair for paranoid shudders and frights, and when it's Rainey on his own we're offered character building with dialog that's engaging and well-drawn performances from capable actors. Lovely cinematography, too, everything and everyone is beautiful. Early on I thought it was lead actor Johnny Depp who owned this movie, but eventually realized that even Depp was under Koepp's reins the whole time.

Depp balances his performance well, when you consider it. Mort Rainey spend the entire movie in a pissy mod and is kind of a dick, which Depp stays true to, yet at the same time he manages to be amusing and at least sympathetic enough to hold center stage without turning us away. It's nice to see Depp give a sincere performance as a real human being for once. Sadly he's given his career over to highly mannered caricatures – fun to watch but it gets tiring when you know he's capable of more.

Instead it's John Turturro who almost delivers a caricature. Almost, but not not quite. As John Shooter Turturro looks, thinks, and speaks like a hayseed but shining through is an urgent sense of pathos and wounded pride, of outraged dignity. The guy is scary but in an obvious, hulking way. John Shooter is entirely incapable of reason, an infuriating tunnel vision Turturro puts across with ease.

I don't have anything else to say of the material or the film, and I'm usually doubtful about discussing the way audiences take to a movie...but I have to say that looking at the preponderance of comments on SW's IMDb page is disheartening. The majority of users there have a mindlessly misogynistic outlook on Rainey's soon-to-be ex for having had an affair. It is made clear that she was driven away by Rainey, and that he himself is to blame for the state he is in. More, the movie's portrayal of Amy Rainey (Maria Bello) is entirely sympathetic, a woman who still cares deeply for her estranged husband and wants to keep him as a friend. Yet in spite of all this, most of the movie's audience sees her as a “bitch” who has a comeuppance in store. Sometimes it's not the movie that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.


 

August 24th

Needful Things (Fraser Clarke Heston, 1993)

The devil's in the details.

Leland Gaunt has opened a new curio shop in Castle Rock. Whatever your fondest desire, he can get it for you. The price is a cruel prank you’ll play on someone, anonymously. Everybody is buying.

Needful Things was marketed as the swan song for Castle Rock. King was taking it off the map. That meant another panoramic tale of a community necessitating one of his longer novels, taking care to breathe life into many different characters. That's a hard challenge for a movie adaptation with a two-hour length. When I first saw Needful Things I had mixed feelings about it for all that was left out. Then again, I'm one of those King fans that loves his books to be long as long as his paths aren't constantly winding back on themselves. I love to immerse. You can't do that in a kiddie pool, there's no deep end to dive into. Maybe that's why I was never big on short stories. Having read the novel already, the movie seemed glossy but empty. I don't think it got much acceptance, since it's never spoken of and director Fraser C. Heston's career effectively ended with his first big film. That's a shame because looking at it now after all this time, I've done a complete one-eighty. I've seen seen some great movies this month, some that were more endearing, and some scary but of them all Needful Things has been the most pure fun.

So how 'bout them details? I have to staart with the incomparable, always original Amanda Plummer. Her Netty Cobb is not the central character, but she's really the essence of the story – an eccentric like the town, and a heart of pure gold. It really takes the Devil to push her way, way off the edge. It happens to every citizen of Castle Rock but Plummer lends Netty an innate sweetness that really isn't there in the book and I think looking back on it it's her downfall that's the most undeserved. She's got a natural enemy in a local pig farmer...but that's not who's been breaking her china.

You cannot feel at all bad for the comeuppance of the two priests in town (Don S. Davis, William Morgan Sheppard), of rival faiths, when they're such perfect representations of the chasm between man's faults and the church's aspirations to perfection. Their lack of innocence lends itself to comedy, and this movie is having a ball.

Obliquely then, on to the horse-racing addict comes to mind, the uptight little bureaucrat no one loves – Danforth “Buster” Keaton. J.T. Walsh begins by playing a blowhard at reasonable volume, the kind of sphincter we've all sadly met, and ramps up in increments until he's the biggest and most dangerous laugh in the movie. You see, the man's in debt and thinks a magical, vintage toy can save him.

All the work of one Leland Gaunt, deliciously underplayed by Max Von Sydow. Gaunt has had shops of similar name as far back as history has been written, in every country. His shop carries, miraculously, just the very thing your heart desires most. You can afford it if you make a deal. He doesn't ask for your soul, just a prank. Your soul is what you lose a little at a time when you agree to hurt someone who's done you no harm. You, see, it never ends. Once guilty, you're never off the hook.  It's original sin, the greatest crime ever perpetrated on humankind.  We're not meant to stand up for ourselves and shrug off our imposed sentence of guilt.

One man begins to catch on, and that's Sheriff Alan Pangborn (Ed Harris), late of The Dark Half, charged with investigating the sudden rash of ill will and with keeping the peace amongst ever angrier recipients of these “pranks”. Fingers are pointing everywhere but at everyone's favorite new proprietor, Mr. Gaunt. And why shouldn't Pangborn like him too when he's offering a miracle cure for the crippling arthritis that mark the days of Pangborn's love (Bonnie Bedelia)?

As I said, there's a rich tapestry of town life, and while the movie trims much of the book there's plenty left for a movie. We move in and out of a social web that never stops moving, one strand making turbulence for countless others until the whole thing is collapsing in on itself. As King does in the novel, director Heston and screenwriter W.D. Richter skewer all manner of social life – the niceties, the mores, networks, they do it with amusement and wit, and they spare no one. It's a patchwork that always feels integral. It's expertly acted – you can feel each citizen as a recognizable human being with his or her own internal life – well choreographed, beautifully shot, and edited to a pace that is just leisurely enough to allow the scenes to breathe.

What's sobering about the movie is that Gaunt is hardly needed. This is who we are. What, exactly, is stopping us from acting on our worst instincts? We do, of course, time and again. Imagine if we all did, at once.

There's a very delicate balance to pull off here, making this material genuinely funny without forcing the audience to betray their empathy. That Heston does just this deserves more credit than the film has garnered. I'm not always taken with black comedy, some are too mean-spirited for my taste, but Needful Things had me laughing.