Desperation is a bit too lackadaisical.
For a story steeped in apocalyptic scale, Desperation ends up feeling oddly hemmed in. Stephen King’s 1996 novel was one half of a mirrored literary experiment with The Regulators (written under his Richard Bachman alias), and while both share characters and themes, Desperation was always the more metaphysically ambitious elaborate. So it’s faintly ironic that Mick Garris’s 2006 adaptation for television plays like a containment exercise, siphoning off the story’s religious mania and cosmic horror until all that’s left is a competent, curiously muted oddity.
Ron Perlman gives the film its most vivid asset, chewing through the role of possessed sheriff Collie Entragian with manic verve; a performance pitched just enough off-centre to suggest something very wrong under the skin and wringing some welcome eccentricity from a film that otherwise plays things a little too straight. Tom Skerritt and Steven Weber lend their thinly sketched characters as much gravitas as they can, while Charles Durning and Annabeth Gish do their best with the film’s lurching shifts between hokey exposition and biblical pronouncement. Shane Haboucha, saddled with the unenviable task of delivering King’s clunky faith-as-magic dialogue, just about holds his own.
The problem isn’t the acting, it’s that the direction seems largely disinterested in doing more than pointing the camera at it. Mick Garris, a default custodian of King’s small screen adaptations, brings the same steady but uninspired touch he applied to The Stand and The Shining. As with Garris’ stay at the Overlook hotel, the script is King’s own, and the collaboration between the two continues to feel more like an act of mutual accommodation than artistic alchemy. There’s no friction, no challenge, no elevation. Like George Lucas and Rick McCallum, they agree too easily, and the result is something oddly inert: faithful, yes, but strangely incurious about its own potential, much like the town of Desperation itself, an eerie, emptied husk of a place that never quite convinces as a supernatural war zone. It looks like a backlot on lunch break, not a crucible of spiritual reckoning.
Much of the dialogue survives the leap from page to screen intact, including the novel’s fixation on divine intervention and chosen vessels, but Garris trims or sidelines the novel’s stranger digressions. The film preserves the bones of the plot but boils them clean of the marrow, the idea of God as something terrifying and indifferent, channelled through childlike faith and Old Testament wrath. The elements are still present, but feel neutered by the constraints of network television and the director’s preference for declamation over atmosphere.
As with many Garris/ King adaptations, Desperation is less interested in exploring the horror than watching characters talk about it at length resulting in a series of scenes that often undercut their own tension with explanation or scripture. It gets notably more talky as it goes on, stretching theological discussions into monologues and dragging out moments that should land with urgency, mistaking volume for awe. Garris has never been a visually ambitious director, but Desperation may well be his least spectacular work to date; not just functional, but actively uninterested in composing any striking images to match the vast scope of the story, or disguise the small-scale production.
Desperation isn’t terrible. It’s just overwhelmingly average. The bigger-names-than-you-expect cast offer solid, sometimes interesting work, and King’s script doesn’t exactly disgrace the novel, but there’s little sense of scale, jeopardy, or madness. For a story about characters caught between an ancient evil and an inscrutable deity, itself feels appropriately purgatorial to sit through.
