Stephen King is one of the world’s most popular authors. His works have been adapted into movies more than just about anyone else. On paper that makes sense. Beyond his immense popularity, his books are full of well-drawn characters, plots that generally swing, and all sorts of killer clowns, small-town vampires, the living dead, rabid dogs, and murderous cars. That should easily translate to the cinema.
More often than not it doesn’t. Movies based on Stephen King’s books are usually pretty bad. Needful Things is no exception. My continuing theory is that the movies tend to focus on those crazy monsters and the supernatural, but as any fan of King’s books can tell you, you might come to King for the killer clowns, but you stay for his descriptive abilities, and the way he fully draws his characters. The movies tend to shorten the character development in order to focus on the monsters and other craziness.
I’ve not read Needful Things, but I can feel the filmmakers doing that with the story. The basic outline is that a strange character named Leland Gaunt (Max Von Sydow) opens a shop called Needful Things in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. He’ll sell you the thing you most desire. And he’ll sell it to you for cheap. A little cash and maybe a favor or two.
The favors, of course, are of evil intent. He’ll get you to do something bad, but not too bad. At least it doesn’t seem that bad to the person doing it. He gives a young boy a Mickey Mantle baseball card and in return asks him to smear some mud on a lady’s clean sheets, hanging out to dry. That’s mean, maybe, but not evil. Except what the boy doesn’t know is that this lady will blame Nettie Cobb (Amanda Plummer) a waitress she’s been feuding with. Someone else will be tasked to do something against Nettie who will blame the sheet lady. On and on it will go until the two women are coming at each other with knives and a cleaver. Soon enough the entire town is at each other’s throats.
But the thing is in the King novel (I presume, still haven’t read it, but I’d be willing to bet money this is true) he plumbs into the details of each character’s desires and what makes those favors so disastrous.
For example, there is one character who is sold an old high school athletic jacket. One imagines that in the book King spends multiple pages telling us about this guy. Digging into how his best days were in high school, playing sports, getting the girl, and exceeding at life. About how every day after that has been a steady series of letdowns. We’d understand who this guy was, and why that jacket means everything to him. In the movie, we get a ten-second flashback of him riding around in a convertible with his jacket on and a girl at his side. That gets the point across, but not enough to make me actually care.
That happens over and over in the film. There are a lot of characters who buy a lot of things from Gaunt and have to perform a lot of favors for him. We get the gist of everything, but none of the details. And it’s the details that make us care.
The cast, including Ed Harris as our hero the sheriff, and J.T. Walsh as an asshole businessman are all good for what little they are given. Max Von Sydow is clearly having a wonderful time. He’s worth the price of admission alone.
In the end it isn’t the worst Stephen King adaptation, but it is far from the best.
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