"Needful Things"

Stephen King's novel Needful Things is a morality tale about the Devil's visit to the small Maine town of Castle Rock, and the mayhem that ensues. I thought it was a great story, so I was interested when "Needful Things," the movie, popped up on cable, uncut, on the HDNet Movies channel. I was pleased to see Ed Harris as the main good guy, Bonnie Bedelia as his squeeze (you may remember her as John McClane's wife Holly Gennaro/McClane in the first two Die Hard films), and the always-awesome Max von Sydow in the role of Satan-- here named, as he is in the novel, Mr. Leland Gaunt. It's an interesting switch for von Sydow, who battled Satan (or his demons) in 1973's "The Exorcist."

Alas, despite a fine cast, the filmic "Needful Things" was a huge disappointment, as so many film adaptations of novels are. Poor Ed Harris is forced by the script to give a long, pious speech to the townies at the end, and instead of King's very visual confrontation between Ed Harris's town sheriff and Mr. Gaunt-- during which Gaunt's true form is revealed-- we are given a cop-out.

What was most distasteful was that the movie ended up making exactly the opposite point of the novel. In the novel, it's clear that the Devil preys upon humanity's inherent sinfulness. Everything bad that happens in the town is, ultimately, the result of the free choices made by all the characters, which makes them all morally culpable, despite Gaunt's various methods of subtle compulsion. But the devil himself needs to be expelled, and Sheriff Pangborn's confrontation with Leland gaunt at the end of the novel serves as a sort of exorcism. In the movie version, however, Pangborn's speech makes clear that the townies aren't at fault at all: the blame rests squarely on Gaunt. And Gaunt, instead of being expelled from the town, leaves it under his own power. It's an ill-advised switch of the loci of responsibility.

It must be a painful thing for a novelist to watch his work get chopped to ribbons for the big screen. Perhaps King has grown used to this by now; the adaptations of his horror stories are almost all notoriously bad, while his non-horror short stories ("The Body" and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" come to mind) tend to turn out well. King might be richer than I can even dream of becoming, but he still has my sympathies. "Needful Things," the movie, was a waste of time. Needful Things, the novel, is worth your while.


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