Desperation BY BRENDAN NEWTON | The Joseph Planta Commentary |

Desperation

By Brendan Newton, for THECOMMENTARY.CA

Thursday, 08 June 2006

It's been five years since I discovered Stephen King through his novel Desperation, and the book has always been a favourite of mine. In those five years, there were constant rumours, reports, and false starts of the production of a movie based on Desperation. There was a script written by Big Steve himself, and King veteran Mick Garris (The Stand, the TV Shining) was directing, but other than that, not much was clearly happening, and it wasn't even certain if it was going to be a theatrical release or TV movie or miniseries. In the end, however, the pieces came together, and the finished product, a three-hour TV movie which I was itching to watch and review, aired on the night of Tuesday, May 23 at 8:00pm. Against the finals of American Idol (if you care about that sort of thing, that older guy that wasn't the girl won) and the super-popular House on Fox. I haven't seen the ratings, but I think I have a pretty good idea of which programs won that battle. I really do owe Joseph one for letting me write a review of a TV movie that probably won't air again on North American TV (of course, the DVD should be along fairly soon!) and which probably didn't haul in spectacular ratings.

Anyway, Desperation's title refers to the desert town of Desperation, Nevada, a nothing little town only notable for its massive mine, known as the China Pit because of the large amount of Chinese immigrants who worked and died there. Mining has just resumed on the Pit after years of inactivity and, this being a Stephen King story after all…it has stirred up something evil, a being known as Tak. Tak's nature is left fairly ambiguous in both the novel and the film; it can best be described as an evil force which possesses people and turns them into crazed, random killers. It can also possess and control "low" animals such as vultures, coyotes, snakes, spiders and scorpions, which are a creepy presence in both book and film. Tak's is a chaotic evil; there's no grand plan for world domination, no justification for its actions, just the desire to kill in creative ways. Like all of King's most memorable monsters, Tak also has a hellishly playful sense of humour that is perfectly captured by Ron "Hellboy" Perlman as Tak's main host, a giant of a sheriff's deputy named Collier Entragian. Perlman's off-the-wall yet terrifying performance is the best thing about this movie, and in terms of bringing King's villains to life on screen it's equalled only by Tim Curry's Pennywise the Clown in the TV miniseries It.

Tak also causes his host's body to decay rapidly to the point of death, meaning that it needs a fresh supply of living bodies to inhabit. Having killed the entire population of Desperation (save for Tom Billingsley, an alcoholic veterinarian who is instead locked in the town jail), Tak uses Entragian's status as a cop to arrest passing motorists. These include Peter and Mary Jackson, a couple from New York ("Peter Jackson? I loved Lord of the Rings!" declares the cop, shortly before grabbing Peter in a friendly embrace and pumping several bullets into him), John Edward Marinville, a Great American Writer (think Hemingway or Norman Mailer) haunted by memories of an act of cowardice in Vietnam, Steve Ames, a goofy former roadie hired by Marinville's agent to keep him from falling off the wagon, Cynthia Smith, a flakey yet likeable hitchhiker picked up by Steve, and the Carver family, a Middle American nuclear family whose son David has just experienced a dramatic religious conversion after his best friend recovered from a near-fatal car accident after David prayed for him. David's faith in God even after Tak kills his younger sister leads him to enact a daring and improbable escape from Desperation's jail (one of the most suspenseful scenes in both book and movie), free the others, and then lead them in a quest to defeat Tak by sealing it in the mine from which it came. David is the group's leader from the start, but it soon becomes clear that the reluctant John is also essential to the quest, and that God has plans for him too…

The movie is well-cast, with Perlman as mentioned above being the stand-out. Whether subtly slipping the words "I'm going to kill you" into the reading of the Miranda rights or breaking into a little song and dance routine shortly before brutally beating Marinville, Perlman exudes the perfect mix of corrupted authority, sadism, and off-the-wall humour. It's a shame that he's not in more of the movie than he is, and that this wasn't a big screen release, because his performance could have been immortalized in the pop culture lexicon in the way that Jack Nicholson's performance in The Shining was. The rest of the cast give generally good performances; Steven Weber and Kelly Overton are great fun to watch as Steve and Cynthia , while Charles Durning as the alcoholic but amiable Billingsley is close to how I imagined the character in the book. I wasn't sure if Matt Frewer would work as David's Everyman father Ralph-he usually plays much quirkier characters, but he gives a quietly great performance considering that he really isn't given a lot to do besides stand around looking worried for his family's safety. Annabeth Gish, familiar as the much-maligned Agent Reyes in later seasons of The X-Files, has some standout scenes as the surprisingly resourceful and heroic Mary Jackson. Likewise Tom Skerritt, who manages the right mix of toughness, eccentricity, guilt, and reluctant heroism as John. I always feel bad critiquing the performances of child actors, but David Carver is a complex main character in the book, so Shane Laboucha's performance, while good in places (especially his escape from his jail cell) was bound to fall flat. I think that may be one of the reasons why King's works don't always translate that well to the screen. Children are King's most vivid characters, but this makes their characters too complex for most young actors to fully capture. Another factor in my disappointment with David's portrayal may have less to do with Laboucha and more to do with the fact that David's role in the book was primarily one of spiritual leader; in a movie, which is all about showing and not telling, he was downplayed while John, who does more physically heroic things, took centre stage. This is inevitable, but I was disappointed with it as for me the most appealing thing about King's novel was the fact that it was about an average eleven-year old boy (not unlike myself at that age) who finds himself drawn into a supernatural Biblical conflict, and that sense of epic spirituality is lacking in the movie.

I am usually frustrated by movies based on books that make unnecessary changes to the story; generally, I feel that movies should follow the books that they are based on as closely as possible, and if too many changes have to be made, then the book was probably unfilmable to begin with. Desperation does not fall into this trap, as the only major character from the book that is excised from the film is Audrey Wyler, a woman who, semi-possessed by Tak, infiltrates the group and almost kills David. This is understandable, since while Audrey was a scary character in the book she was not an essential part of the story and the movie works fine without her. It does mean, however, that we lose one of the book's best scenes that I would have liked to have seen in the film, David's near-death experience and vision of "the Land of the Dead" where he speaks with a young John Marinville. This is a disappointing loss, but again nothing too earth-shattering.

In fact, my major problem with Desperation is not that it deviates too strongly from the book, but in fact that it follows the book too closely for its own good. Like director Garris' earlier King adaptation The Stand, it preserves almost all of the incidents from the book without ever asking why the book worked and how to translate that to film. Desperation the book worked because of the memorable villain, the frankly scary horror and gore, and the way said gore contrasted with David's deep spirituality and relationship with God. Tak was a memorable villain in the book, and still a good villain in the movie, but in the visual medium of film Tak's most visual aspects should have been highlighted, meaning more Entragian than we got and more of the creepy-crawly animals. My worst fear about Desperation being an ABC TV movie was that much of the book's blood and gore would be cut out, but the movie was pretty graphic for a TV movie and I was pleasantly surprised by how much the network let the movie's creators get away with. As for the book's spiritual aspect, however, it perhaps unsurprisingly didn't make the leap from page to screen quite as well. The book felt like an Old Testament story of violence and God and evil written by, well, written by Stephen King, but somehow the movie lacks this same spirit, and things that sounded profound in the book come out sounding empty on screen ("God is Everything. That's what makes Him God." This sounds like the sort of thing that would pass for deep and meaningful amongst a group of very stoned university students). I suppose the presence of God is an incredibly hard thing to pull off on screen, but King and Garris don't offer us anything visual to make up for this, they seem so intent on replicating the novel scene-by-scene. Garris would do well to look at Frank Darabont's adaptations of King's work, The Green Mile and The Shawskank Redemption, which both manage to remain faithful to the original story but also somehow manage to "translate" the spirit of the books, as well as just the stories, into the medium of film.

As I said at the beginning of this review, I had been waiting for Desperation for quite a while. It was entertaining, but it was too directly based on the book without quite conveying the book's spirit or ever really standing on its own as a movie despite the good performances by the cast, especially Ron Perlman. It should be appearing on DVD before too long, but it's only really worth a look if you're already a fan of King or of horror in general.

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