STEPHEN KING'S RIDING THE BULLET

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Friday, October 15, 2004

For some reason, even though Stephen King is best known as a writer for horror fiction, when his work is translated to the screen, it is the adaptations of his more character-driven work (,STAND BY ME, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, THE GREEN MILE) that get the most respect. STEPHEN KING'S RIDING THE BULLET splits the difference it is a ghost story but it is squarely centered in the emotional life of its protagonist Alan Parker (Jonathan Jackson).

It's October 1969 and college student Alan, fascinated with the kind of imagery that will adorn Grateful Dead albums and comic book covers in future but just now is considered morbid, makes a suicide attempt. It's a half-hearted effort that fails, but Alan has unknowingly opened a door to something ugly. When he gets word that his beloved mother Jean (Barbara Hershey) has suffered a stroke, Alan determines to hitchhike from his dorm to the hospital. It's Halloween night and Alan has a few scary adventures along the road, even before he accepts a fateful ride and finds out how the unwilling dead feel about people who have considered ending their own lives and the bargains they strike ...

Director/scenarist Mick Garris (who previously helmed King's SLEEPWALKERS, THE STAND and the TV miniseries remake of THE SHINING) establishes a wonderful sense of period that subtly but potently enhances the material. Contrasting the "if I knew then what I know now" nature of King's story (which in its prose form is set in the present) with a larger social sense of pained nostalgia deepens the story's pervasive sense of loss and creates a resonance between Alan's predicament and the larger world without ever forcing the issue. The filmmaker also handles some tricky transitions between naturalism, supernatural reality and Alan's fantasies in a way that consistently delivers surprises without ever becoming narratively muddled.

Garris is an expert at staging scares and handles a helpful narrative device when Alan talks to himself, there are literally two of him in frame with a matter-of-fact manner that helps us accept it as easily as Alan does himself. The cast is excellent, with Jackson giving a thoughtful and fluid leading performance and Hershey giving us a strong look at a woman who is trying desperately to hold herself together with very little aid. David Arquette displays a combination of righteous rage, glee and pure menace as a driver who gives Alan a ride and Cliff Robertson is affecting and eerie as a pathetic old man who may be senile or supernatural.


STEPHEN KING'S RIDING THE BULLET does honor to both ends of the King spectrum: it is literate, stylish, nuanced and still delivers a good spooky jolt of Halloween "Boo!"


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