Caan was better than Bates
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ToastedCheese — 3 years ago(July 21, 2022 08:05 AM)
Bates was good fun but the character didn’t have an awful lot of range - she is much better as another King character, Dolores Claiborne a few years later.
Yes, I have recently mentioned that to another poster. The range could have been forthcoming though, had Reiner and Goldman taken a different approach to how they wanted to portray Wilkes. Bates needed to be edgier.
The film could still have been darkly humorous, but born naturally out of the situation, than a forced representation.
Norman! What did you put in my tea? -
BlablaBlackSheep — 2 years ago(September 13, 2023 01:29 AM)
The book feels a little more serious and darker. It really is a horror novel. The film is a nice Hitchcockian suspense thriller, but it does lack the sadism of the book. And is a tad goofy at times.
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ToastedCheese — 2 years ago(September 13, 2023 11:20 AM)
The film bordered too much on satire and falls flat in spots.
The undertaking of representing King's intimate and claustrophobic tale kept tripping itself up. Reiner wanted to make it more mainstream and therefore was the wrong choice to direct.
Norman! What did you put in my tea? -
Melton1 — 3 months ago(December 29, 2025 11:35 PM)
It’s a perfect film, and is better than the very good novel. Goldman nailed the screenplay, Reiner crushes the direction, keeping the focus on the actors (and rightly changing the foot amputation to an ankle smashing - something Goldman objected to but was totally won over by when he saw the finished piece)
Caan is perfect as Paul, and Bates is incredible as Annie. She deserved that award, and all the subsequent praise. -
ToastedCheese — 3 months ago(December 30, 2025 02:28 AM)
I have read the excellent novel twice. No film adaptation can be the novel. Sometimes they are better, sometimes they aren’t.
It is a very good film, with a technically erratic performance by Bates. It is too forced. While her character was erratic, her representation of Wilkes’s psychosis was not sublime or nuanced enough to be believable.
Check an earlier post I made about performance compares.
Norman! What did you put in my tea?