Stephen King's Storm of the Century aired on ABC in February of 1999, and the tele-film exemplifies King's familiar story template of building up a town person by person, introducing a sliver of discord, and watching the whole populace collapse like a house of cards. Here, that sliver of discord manifests as mysterious wanderer Andre Linoge, cousin to Randall Flagg and Leland Gaunt, possible god-son of Bradbury's Mr. Dark. Colm Feore plays the role with puckish satisfaction, somehow chewing the scenery while sitting still and staring for most of the tele-film. In this scene, Linoge puppets two townspeople into murder...
Cat Withers (Julianne Nicholson) trudges out after her boyfriend, Billy Soames (Jeremy Jordan). Earlier, Linoge revealed publicly that Cat aborted Billy's baby without him knowing, and she now tries to reconcile with him. "Wide" shots in television have only recently become useful, with the proliferation of larger televisions and wider screens, so tracking shots like this come few and far between. Ideally, Storm of the Century should delight in minimizing the people and emphasizing the snow-covered surroundings of Little Tall Island, but viewers rarely get a sense of scope outside of establishing shots.
Billy keeps his back to Cat for most of the scene, an obvious visual metaphor that he's turned his back on her. Although Cat reveals that she knew Billy was unfaithful to her, Billy carries his self-righteousness throughout the scene, and his contempt burns like a lit fuse.
First off, wow, Julianne Nicholson's a cutie-pie. She was around twenty-eight when this filmed, but she convincingly plays younger, and she's got those big green eyes and that light smattering of freckles...
I was speaking earlier about how television doesn't play well with wide-shots. Another thing that television doesn't handle well is conversations. Generally, television must be shot rapidly, due to lower budgets and therefore shorter schedules, and so conversations are almost always shot as unimaginatively as possible: medium shots that establish characters' locations, then close-ups that emphasize actors' faces.
Through Jordan's acting, viewers learn that Billy's a simple kid. "It's our baby and now it's dead, I guess." Baxley's use of shadow places Billy halfway in the dark, which furthers the idea that he's thinking unpleasant thoughts about Cat (notice how her face is full of light in her close-up above). The first part of this sequence occurs free of music - the only sounds are the wind in the trees and the creaking of the shed. That all changes, when...
Linoge twirls his finger inside his cell, far from the quarreling lovers. Linoge already murdered others, both directly and through psychic manipulation, so the goal of the scene becomes clear. The pattern will repeat, and someone will die. Confirming this, the camera tilts from his hand to his face...
Which is covered half in shadow, visually mirroring the shadow on Billy's face. A quiet piano ostinato and soft strings accompany Linoge's machinations. No crazy magical sound effects or bizarre instrumentation, not even when Billy looks at one of the food cans and sees something jarring.
In case you can't read it, the legend at the bottom says "Made With a Blend of Rotten New England Apples." Nice touch. If you haven't noticed, the look of the film skews monochromatic, with blues and greys and blacks dominating the images. This, like other elements, feels obvious, but compared against the comic-book brightness of Garris's The Stand*, the difference is striking. This is a bleak, pessimistic film, and its style matters.
While the music builds, hero Mike Anderson (Tim Daly) recognizes, for the first time, that Linoge is just as dangerous inside his cell as outside his cell, a notion that he could only entertain beforehand. That idea of a no-win scenario powers the remainder of the story and leads to a conclusion that should be much more famous than it is.
One of the big problems with previous King mini-series, like Mick Garris's The Shining and Tom Holland's The Langoliers, is the over-reliance on special effects. Yes, King's novels featured hedge animals and jaw-spheres of death (yep), but their on-screen counterparts look tinny and fake. Although Storm of the Century falls into this trap a few times, Baxley and King generate most of their suspense the old-fashioned way, with lo-fi traits like color, music, and cross-cutting. As we watch Linoge "walk" his hand along his arm...
Billy walks toward Cat with a heavy can of apples...
Linoge raises his arms...
Billy raises his arms...
...the can right above Cat's head.
Although I've talked about cross-cutting and color and composition, the most important element here is the context. Cat and Billy have reached an impasse that feels genuine and sad. They have both betrayed each other, and they have to live with that, because their town of Little Tall is so clearly a trap from which neither can escape. The technique is important here, but it has its limitations. What brings the suspense home is that these two people feel real. Their problems feel real. This extends to the entire film, which goes out of its way to develop tertiary characters and let us see their regret, fears, hopes and worries. That way, we sympathize, and then we connect, and when the horror finally arrives, we share in the fear.
*I don't mean this as an insult toward Garris's work on The Stand. This darker style would not have worked for Garris's tele-film, which existed in a sun-lit world and held a story closer to comic books, with its expressionistic dream sequences and good-evil story of binaries. Sadly, there's no Mother Abigail to bring hope to the citizens of Little Tall. All they have is each other.
For more small-town Stephen King, check out Under the Dome.
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