RSS
Home
James Caan in Stephen King's Misery
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
http://chud.com/articles/content_images/5/2_James_Caan.jpg
When I was younger I knew who James Caan was. He was the villain from Bulletproof, of course, starring Adam Sandler and Damon Wayans—a movie I thought was hilarious and risqué, right before I hit puberty.
As I got older, I had to let go of James Caan as the dad in Mickey Blue Eyes, and adjust to James Caan as Sonny Corleone from The Godfather. It took me some time to accept him as the great actor that he is.
But when I first saw the movie Misery, directed by Rob Reiner and based on the Stephen King book of the same name, I had no trouble with James Caan as Paul Sheldon, the cynical writer with more than a slight distaste for his own best-selling novels.
Nowhere in the film do we get a biography of Paul Sheldon; it begins with his completing a manuscript for a new novel and subsequently skidding to his near-death in a violent Colorado blizzard. We learn only that Paul Sheldon is the famed writer of the “Misery” romance novels, involving protagonist Misery Chastaine, and that the book he completes at the start of the film is his first non-Misery novel in years. His last installment in the series sees Misery’s death during childbirth, terminating this lucrative character forever.
So everything we infer about Paul Sheldon’s bitter and jaundiced personality before the accident is due to James Caan. Though he wakes from his accident-induced coma in a strange house, being tended to by a creepy self-professed “number 1 fan” named Annie Wilkes, Caan makes Paul Sheldon’s pre-car crash misery apparent behind his weary and drugged expression. The fear that develops during his stay with Annie Wilkes, played incredibly by Kathy Bates, comes more gradually, as he begins to realize that this bundle of polite-ness feeding him painkillers is actually a sociopath and violent murderer with plans of keeping Paul her prisoner until death do them part.
In Stephen King’s novel, the reader is invited into the head of Paul Sheldon, and can share in his growing fear of Annie Wilkes, his addiction to painkillers, and the enduring pain of his shattered legs. We know what he is thinking even as he smiles pathetically at Annie Wilkes and pretends to appreciate her care.
A film adaptation would not work without exposing Paul’s inner psyche, yet there are no other characters to whom he can express it. James Caan, however, makes Paul Sheldon’s motives clear and his fear palpable in more subtle ways, and along with Kathy Bates, turns Misery into a terrifying classic film.
Paul Sheldon is the kind of character we probably would not like had he not been thrust into such an extraordinary situation. But as a prisoner of the obsessive Annie Wilkes, he is our hero, and we sympathize with him. We feel his frustration when his captor forces him to burn his only copy of his new book. We fear for him when Annie Wilkes discovers her beloved literary friend Misery Chastain is dead and threatens absurd disciplinary action. And most importantly, we root for him in the film’s last scene, when Paul’s stay with Annie Wilkes comes to a violent, catastrophic climax.
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
