1922 (2017)

directed by Zak Hildich
USA
101 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This came out right alongside Gerald's Game, another Stephen King adaptation, which I'm assuming was done on purpose. I was surprised to see that it was directed by the dude who did These Final Days, a strangely bro-y Australian apocalypse flick, because the atmosphere of 1922 is the exact opposite of that. Which is admirable, and I was glad that that weird bro-ness didn't show up in 1922.

The first thing to know is that you will either absolutely hate Thomas Jane's performance in this or you'll love it. At first I thought he was ridiculous, but as it went on I realized that those affectations he was putting on for the role were exactly in line with how I heard Wilf's voice in the original short story, despite how silly it initially sounded to hear it out loud. Thomas Jane the actor is borderline unrecognizable as himself in this. Molly Parker could have (and did!) also contributed a great deal, but I felt she was underused.

I'm glad that so much of the dialogue was kept, because the way the novella was written is very specific and I don't think anybody else's words would have fit so cleanly with the idea of a 1920s middle-American dialect that King had constructed for his protagonist. But the one thing that I didn't see in this movie that I felt would have added a lot was the emphasis on the hatred Wilf feels towards the prospect of his river being sullied with pig guts. This may seem like a small detail, but it's mentioned repeatedly in the book yet is lost almost entirely in the movie, and it's something that stuck with me. Because when you think about it, when Wilf murders his wife for the sake of keeping the tract of land she planned to sell to the hog farm out of the hands of the butchers, he proves that he values hog guts (or rather, the absence of hog guts) more than he values his wife. He would rather have a pristine stream free of hog guts than a living, healthy wife.

The central murder was also underwhelming in the film adaptation of this story. I think it may have been intentional to show the murder as something relatively fast in order to highlight how one quick deed ruined multiple lives, but in the book the impression I got of the act was that it was a horrible, drawn-out process that none of the characters, no matter how jaded, were prepared for.

I gave it four stars, though, since I think this is enough of a complex and atmospheric film to stand on its own, but it doesn't escalate as satisfyingly as the book does, and the impression of something truly supernatural going on- in the way Wilf knows, actually knows things he couldn't possibly have known unless his dead wife quite literally rose from her grave and told them to him- is rushed, as is Hank's downfall. But I have to say that what I'm most disappointed by is the film's total refusal to recognize Stephen King's obvious fixation on the word "snood" that had been so memorable in the original material. Snood!