50 films: #5. Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990)

Misery is not a film of great depth. Neither is it a film of great visual style. What you see is what you get, and what you get is a faithful and in some respects, it might be contended, pedestrian adaptation of a pulpy horror novel. I love it.

Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is a writer who longs to be taken seriously but has fallen into the rut of writing a series of florid but marketable novels set in the 1870s featuring the central character Misery Chastain. To free himself from the shackles of Misery, Sheldon writes a serious and worthy autobiographical novel about life in a slum (which sounds just as dreary as his other books, but that’s by the by), his completion of which coincides with the publication of the final Misery book, Misery’s Child, in which Sheldon has killed off his heroine. As he travels home from the remote Colorado retreat where he traditionally goes to finish each book, his car comes off the road. He is rescued by Liberace-loving nurse Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates).

Rescued isn’t exactly the right term, it turns out, since Wilkes turns out to be his ‘Number One Fan’. Her initial hero worship of Sheldon quickly becomes something more sinister, and when her discovery of Misery’s fate prompts a violent reaction he realises his life may be in danger. From this point, the film is a battle of wits between the two characters, as the incapacitated Sheldon plots his escape and the increasingly deranged Wilkes foils him at every turn. She also has to contend with the local police’s efforts to track down Sheldon after the discovery of his car. The film’s climax is gratifyingly gruesome.

If so much of the film is apparently unremarkable, what is it that makes it special? Primarily, I think, the character of Annie Wilkes and the performance of Kathy Bates, for which she won the Best Actress Oscar. Wilkes’ simple-mindedness, her puritanism and abhorrence of profanity, her stomach-churningly twee quirks of speech, all make her quite delightful to watch. She is giddily excited as she starts to read the latest Misery book. ‘What’s the ceiling that dago painted?’ she asks Sheldon. ‘The Sistine Chapel?’ he tentatively suggests. ‘Yeah! That and Misery’s Child – those are the only two divine things ever in this world!’ There is a dry vein of humour running through the film. Wilkes later complains, ‘People just don’t respect the institution of marriage any more,’ while she punctuates the air emphatically with the bottle of urine in her hand. The moments when she turns from harmless to menacing, when the eyes go dead, have the capacity to chill, provided you’re not laughing too much.

There are nice supporting turns from Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen and Lauren Bacall, but the film’s essentially a two-hander. Caan is perfect as Sheldon, tolerantly amused at Wilkes’ kookiness to begin with, and becoming more rebellious as he realises the fate she has planned for him. The end sees the liberated Sheldon (spoiler, I suppose, but the grammar of the genre permits no other possible outcome) reunited with his agent – but there is still a final little twist in store which is creepy and inspiredly comical in equal measure.

So there you have it. A black comedy, I’d say, with a lot of cheap thrills along the way – but there’s nothing wrong with cheap thrills. Like cheap music, they have their potency.

IMDb | Buy from Amazon.co.uk

Artistic licence

I see that Kim Novak has expressed her upset at the use of music from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in the Oscar-tipped film The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius, and in the strongest terms. ‘I want to report a rape,’ she writes.

Her outrage, melodramatic though it may seem, is at least comprehensible. If you don’t think Vertigo is one of the greatest films ever made, then presumably you haven’t seen it. Its score may be the finest of Bernard Herrmann’s dazzling career, and that is not a claim that can be made lightly when one looks at his credits (all those other Hitchcocks, Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver and so on – and also Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir, a film somewhat neglected nowadays containing a Herrmann score that is one of my personal favourites, and was one of his own, I believe).

The score of The Artist consists almost entirely of original material. I noticed two obvious exceptions when I saw it last Friday: the song ‘Pennies from Heaven’, which is sung around the mid-point of the film; and, towards the end, the music from the ‘Scène d’Amour’ in Vertigo, which is stated in its entirety over the course of one of the later sequences.

I think the idea of some kind of rape is easily dismissed. If it’s legal for Hazanavicius to use Herrmann’s music, then it’s fair game. It’s not the first time the music of Vertigo has been used elsewhere, and it won’t be the last. And it’s not as if either a) the use of this music in The Artist devalues Vertigo at all (that wouldn’t apply even if The Artist were a bad film, which it isn’t) or b) the music is used at all insensitively in The Artist, let alone violently abused (as Wagner’s Tristan prelude was in Lars von Trier’s recent offering Melancholia, which I have avoided primarily for that reason, convinced that it would render the film intolerable for me – read Alex Ross on the subject). On the contrary, the music complements the visual aspect pleasingly, and the combination of the two creates a mood of great tension that is resolved brilliantly.

But in spite of the moral validity of using Herrmann’s music, there may still be a problem; and if there is a problem, then it is this: that anyone who is familiar with Vertigo will already associate the music with that film. When the music started in The Artist, I identified it in a split second, from the very first note. It sent a shiver of excitement running through my body. What a masterstroke it may turn out to be, I thought, after all of the original music that has gone before, suddenly to invoke Vertigo. Then, after a few moments, I began to have doubts. For while I was watching the faces of Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo (and Uggie the dog) on the screen, there were two other faces in my mind, namely those of James Stewart and Kim Novak. Try as I might, I was unable to divorce the film I was watching from the film already in my head, the one I have seen so many times before. As the emotion heightened on screen and that final exciting crescendo began to well, I was thinking in spite of myself of that climactic scene in the bell tower, where Stewart forces Novak up the steps to meet her fate.

At some level, then, the use of the music from Vertigo in The Artist must be considered a failure. I find it hard to imagine that it was chosen simply for its musical quality (though that would have been reason enough); presumably its inclusion was meant to suggest some connection between the two films, though exactly what I can’t say. But ultimately, to those who know Vertigo well enough, the music will inevitably be a distraction. Vertigo is a film of uncommon power, and for The Artist to succeed in breaking the bond between Herrmann’s music and its original application is too much to ask.

The Artist is a film of sufficient quality that the intrusion of Vertigo does not detract too much from its overall impact. The charisma of its stars, Uggie included, is great, and the charm of the film as a snapshot of a vanished golden age considerable. Ludovic Bource, the composer of the rest of the soundtrack, should be mentioned. His music is catchy and memorable (I’m still humming it now) and he is sure to win many awards for it.

End-of-year reading meme

Another meme (the last for a while), this one pilfered from Stuck in a Book. I’ve used the outline of the one I did last year, incorporating some of this year’s innovations.

How many books read in 2011?
86

Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?
74.5/11.5 (the split book being Days and Nights in W12 by Jack Robinson, which I couldn’t make my mind up about)

Male/Female authors?
69.5/16.5 (a marginally wider disparity than last year – oops)

Favourite book read?
Buddenbrooks, without a doubt

Least favourite?
Perhaps Ted Hughes’ lame children’s poetry collection Meet My Folks!

Oldest book read?
I almost wrote King Lear (or was that Shakespeare?), but then remembered that last year I also read Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (early 13th century).

Newest book read?
I read Alan Partridge’s autobiography, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan, immediately on publication. Back of the net.

Longest book title?
Probably Ilana Gershon’s The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media, though it’s a close call

Shortest book title?
Ubik (Philip K. Dick)

How many re-reads?
Only two (Tolkien’s disappointing Smith of Wootton Major and Erich Kästner’s enchanting Emil and the Detectives)

Most books read by a single author?
14 (Alexander McCall Smith). His distant retinue is composed of Armistead Maupin (3), and Jane Austen, Susan Tomes, Raymond Chandler, Robert Graves, Stephen King, Philip K. Dick and Joanne Limburg (2 each).

Any in translation?
8, which seems a meagre return. Four German, one Swedish, one French, one Belgian and one Russian. And nothing in a foreign language, which is bad. This year I will at least make an effort to read something in French, which I failed to do in 2011.

How many books were borrowed from the library?
50

Best blog recommendation?
Skippy Dies, which I first read about on the pages of Asylum.

I had no clue what was going on:
The late Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker and the even later Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds stand out in this category.

Favourite character encountered this year:
Such a hard call to make, this. I think I have to say Hanno Buddenbrook, but I give the highest commendations to McCall Smith’s Bertie Pollock, Paul Murray’s Ruprecht Van Doren (Skippy Dies), Philip K. Dick’s Mr Tagomi (The Man in the High Castle) and Jane Gardam’s Bilgewater.

2011 threesomes

The New Year is the signal for a bit of meme time around here. I like the meme – it’s a socially sanctioned excuse for theft. I stole this idea from a post on Becca’s Blog a year ago. So, what was my 2011 like, in various things?

Top 3 books
It was a pretty decent reading year. One book stands out among all the others, and that is Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which I began reading on holiday, sitting in Cologne Cathedral while I waited for an organ recital by Martin Baker to begin, and finished back in the UK. An utterly engrossing, lovable book. Perhaps I should investigate the family saga further in 2012. John Cheever’s Falconer was another highlight – a short novel about a university professor coping with life in prison. Like nothing I’ve read before, and Cheever is a writer with a magnificent eye for detail. On an arguably less exalted level – but no less wonderful – are Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street books, all seven of which I devoured in the space of a few months in the middle of the year. His humanity and tolerance are infectious.

Top 3 CDs
Of the year’s new releases, I listened to The Prince Consort’s recording of Brahms’ Liebeslieder-Walzer and Stephen Hough’s Other Love Songs a lot. I was fortunate to be at the premiere of the Hough in the summer, and it is a work I have grown to love. Simon Standage’s Mozart violin concerti with the Academy of Ancient Music and Christopher Hogwood have reminded me of the beauty of this music. I also found Christian Bruhn’s Timm Thaler soundtrack tremendous fun.

Top 3 films
I watched a titanic number of films last year (not Titanic; I am not mad). I rarely feel in the mood for watching Bergman, but I found it was his films that impressed me most of all. A genius. The Seventh Seal, Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, but most of all Winter Light. I’ve been watching Fanny and Alexander over the New Year, for the first time in about ten years, and am enjoying being dazzled by it anew. Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp struck me as a great masterpiece, Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook both quite irresistible, and I’m delighted to hear that there is a new print being released in cinemas in a few months’ time. And I might name any of several others as my third film, but for the sake of variety let’s say Before Sunrise, which is a lovely film if you’re of a romantic disposition. (I saw a handful of brilliant new films at the cinema too, so for an alternative three try The King’s Speech, The Guard and Tomboy.)

Top 3 live music
It was a thrill seeing Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s production of Parsifal at ENO in February. It’s only recently that I’ve started going to see Wagner live, and Parsifal is perhaps my favourite opera. John Tomlinson was a superb Gurnemanz, and I marvelled at the economy of the scoring. It exposes as misguided the popular conception of Wagner as sprawling and overblown. Love Stephen Hough at the Wigmore though I did, I think Marc-André Hamelin provided my piano recital of the year at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, playing Haydn, Schumann, Wolpe, Debussy and, as his barnstorming finale, Liszt’s Reminiscences de Norma in the composer’s bicentenary year. And last of all, Pulp at Wireless. Jarvis has still got it.

Top 3 theatre
I’m including musicals and comedy, so there’s only one echt play, and even that’s not particularly echt – namely Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors, which I saw just before Christmas. A breathtaking thing to behold, and quite the most I’ve enjoyed myself in any theatre, perhaps anywhere ever. A rollercoaster, and wrong to single out individual performances in a production so delicious in every aspect (not least its superb music), but I must say I thought Oliver Chris particularly wonderful, funnier than I’ve ever known him before, not to mention James Corden, Tom Edden, Trevor Laird, Daniel Rigby, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum. My trip to Chichester to see the new production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd was a great treat, the cast superb (in spite of some doubts about Michael Ball), and I will make a point of revisiting it in London this year. And thirdly, Jonny Sweet’s lovely solo show, Let’s All Just Have Some Fun (and Learn Something, for Once), which I saw at the Soho Theatre in January. He stands at the front giving the audience bear hugs as they come in; one cannot but love the man.

Lastly, I must add another happy discovery, which has been on the periphery of my consciousness for a while but which I only began to pay attention to this year, John Finnemore’s radio sitcom Cabin Pressure. I think its central cast of four – Finnemore, Benedict Cumberbatch, Roger Allam and Stephanie Cole – must be just about the strongest and most likeable since Rising Damp. A fourth series has just been commissioned. There is no end to Finnemore’s talents, apparently. He also wrote an excellent sketch show for Radio 4, and drew a picture a day on his blog, Forget What Did, as a sort of Advent calendar last month. You owe it to yourself to have a look.

Here’s hoping 2012 is similarly happy, for me and for all of you!