Stephen King still qualifies as a brand name -- he's like McDonald's, or the WWE, the sort of company where you know what you're getting, and you have only yourself to blame if you aren't happy with the product. This is, after all the guy who writes about haunted cars and vampires for fuck's sake -- and carries enough clout that Netflix has invested in two original features this month based on his writing. The movies are based on two of his shorter works, which is where his best stuff is usually found. King's writing went all bloated and wobbly when his love of cocaine dovetailed with the advent of the word processor, because when you give a guy with his galloping imagination and love of words a machine that makes writing easier, coupled with a coke habit, you get novels that are twice as long as they need to be. Fortunately, he could still stick the landing when he wasn't all hell bent on writing an epic. Unfortunately, whether he was writing long or short, King's storytelling can be baffling for filmmakers.
This is evident in Gerald's Game, which is about a middle-aged couple who try to spice up the old love life by engaging in some bedroom role playing. Hubby's idea is to handcuff his wife to the bed so he can act out his rape fantasies. Ironically, he has a heart attack and dies in the middle of playing bad boy, which leaves his angry wife cuffed and helpless. The novel, written by King in the early 90s, was a quick and dirty metaphor for rotten marriages everywhere, especially when a starving dog sneaks into the house and starts snacking on the dead husband's arm. It was nasty stuff, and King exhibited strong insight into the way our adult relationships allow us to rehash templates set in our past. We're shackled to our spouses, we're shackled to beds, we're shackled to our childhood. He nailed it. King is often at his best when writing about, not the horrors of the undead, but the horrors of something far more sinister and mysterious: marriage.
The movie, though, is too slick, too pristine. I remember the couple in the novel being rather average, perhaps unattractive; the movie features a pair of performers who have obviously spent months getting into shape because they knew they were going to be shown in bed, semi-nude. The husband (Bruce Greenwood) looks like one of those fellows in a Viagra commercial, grey at the temples but buff. The wife (Carla Gugino) has biceps like a pole vaulter, all the more noticeable when she's cuffed to the bedposts. The result is that they seem less like a real couple, and more like generic Hollywood types. The script, co-adapted by director Mike Flanagan, can't improve on the worst of King's instincts; in King's world, successful men attend board meetings and tell dirty jokes at Christmas parties. Their wives suffer silently, harboring dreadful secrets. At his best, King creates wonders. At his worst, he's as hokey as Danielle Steel. At least Carel Struycken has a good turn as a gigantic serial killer known as "The Moonlight Man." He's the best thing in the movie.
I'd had higher hopes for 1922, which stars Thomas Jane as a farmer who murders his wife. And while it is better than Gerald's Game, it stumbles a bit. Jane looks appropriately rugged and sunburned, but every time he opens his mouth we see a set of perfect Hollywood choppers, circa 2017. Worse, Jane's acting consists of speaking like he has lockjaw, and spitting a lot. I'm not sure what he was spitting; it wasn't chewing tobacco, not with teeth that white. He's also not very convincing as a man who has committed a heinous crime. This, perhaps, is the fault of director Zak Hilditch, who should've gone for an Edgar Allan Poe type of paranoia, but opts for a tone that is like watered down Tales From the Crypt. Still, even if Jane never seems sufficiently spooked, 1922 manages to be more compelling than Gerald's Game. For King's stories to work best, the viewer must be put in the position of a child with an unpredictable parent. In both of these Netflix originals, the tone is sleepy, not nightmarish. Each movie has an unsettling moment or two, and there are plenty of rats, and knives and disfigured faces, but neither Hilditch nor Flanagan understands what scares us, or what makes marriage such a minefield, or why poor farmers of a century ago didn't have teeth like Tom Cruise.
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