***
out of ****
It's
been a couple of days now since I watched the Netflix original movie “Gerald's Game”, and
upon a great deal of reflection I can say that my feelings are
basically this:
Soooooo close. But not quite.
In it, Jessie
Burlingame (Carla Gugino) and her husband Gerald (Bruce Greenwood)
head up to their cottage in the off season so they can be completely
alone for an attempt to inject a little spice into their love life.
The “spice” involves and couple of sets of handcuffs and the
headboard. Succinctly, while Jessie is cuffed to the bed Gerald
has a heart attack and dies, leaving her to her own survival devices
– nobody will be coming to rescue her since nobody knows where they
went and nobody is near enough to hear her scream.
And let's not forget
that filthy, starving mongrel roaming around the neighbourhood.....
But
Jessie has a lot of inner demons. Facing her own peril makes her
look hard at herself and her history. The plot device used to
explore this aspect of the film is in hallucinations, where Jessie
addresses an imaginary Gerald and an alternate version of herself.
She is forced to examine some childhood traumas involving her father
(Henry Thomas) as she tries to come up with a way to escape her
situation. Most of this is riveting to watch and horrifying to
consider, and the film-makers did an admirable job of Jessie's self
examination.
I've
been a huge fan of King's since I first read “Different Seasons”
in 1983, and when it comes to film adaptations of his work my primary
complaint is almost always that the film didn't follow the book
closely enough. Some of his greatest novels have been made into big
screen atrocities because of that artistic license. When “Gerald's
Game” came out in 1992 I felt it ended a string of poor literary efforts from
King and was one of his greatest works – and surely one that could
easily be made into a great film just by following the plot. After
all, it requires no special effects, no ghosts or vampires, no
end-of-the-world sets be made. And this films just barely misses
being everything I felt that it could be.
Here's
why.
The
scariest thing that Jessie encounters as she is cuffed to the bed is
something that she can't quite decide if it is real or her
imagination. The first night she is there, she thinks she sees a man
standing in the dark shadows of the room. But he can't be real
because his arms are as long as an orangutans, and his head is
weirdly malformed. Is he a part of her hallucinations, or is her
“moonlight man” really there stalking her before moving in for
the kill?
When
reading the book, the Moonlight Man is easily the most frightening
thing in it. His reality or lack thereof is one of Jessie's major
motivations in escaping. And Stephen King treats him in an “is he
real or is he not” way that leaves you really not knowing, even
after the main climax of the book. Because then came the long post
script that some readers hated, but for me was the most satisfying
part of the novel.
MAJOR
SPOILERS CONTAINED BELOW THIS LINE.
DO
NOT READ ONE MORE WORD IF YOU DON'T WANT THE MOVIE SPOILED!!!
Jessie
escapes. She lives. Her method of escape is so unbelievably gut wrenching
that many viewers won't be able to handle watching it. Even knowing
exactly what was going to happen, I was in a state of perma-cringe during
the scene. And we find out whether or not the Moonlight Man was
real. Which he was.
The
last long section of the novel is a letter written by Jessie where
she tells the story of a string of grave and crypt robberies in her
area. The local cops spend a great deal of time trying to catch the ghoul (who they have dubbed "Romeo" due to his sexual abuse of the corpses),
but never with any success. Jessie recounts this all in her letter
before describing the man that is eventually caught for the crimes,
one Raymond Andrew Joubert. This man suffers from a pituitary
problem making his limbs radically elongated and his head misshapen.
He is Jessie's Moonlight Man.
But
in the book Joubert, when he was in the house, was treated as an
apparition. His reality, terrifying though it was, is never
established one way or the other. The film version makes him much less ethereal,
considerably more real. There never seems to be any doubt that he
was really there and that he is definitely coming back. And whereas
the final sequence of the novel is spellbinding, where Jessie finds a
way to confront him long after her ordeal, in the film it is almost a totally extraneous event, almost completely without contributing
anything at all to the movie.
I definitely do recommend the film, but feel that with just a little more care it would have been something even more special than it already is. As it is, it's damned fine entertainment, especially if you're a bit on the demented side of normal.
