The Devil’s in the discount.
There’s a certain irony in a story about a man who sells people exactly what they think they want, because Needful Things is itself a film that promises everything Stephen King fans could desire only to parcel it out in measured doses. It’s not quite the junk masquerading as gemstones that Leland Gaunt would sell you, but it’s definitely not your heart’s desire either. Directed by Fraser C Heston (son of Charlton), it takes King’s 1991 novel of greed, temptation, and small-town rot and reshapes it into something with more momentum and less depth. The result isn’t cursed, but it does feel like a film afraid to linger too long on its own wickedness.
Castle Rock is a small town simmering with small town grudges and a chequered supernatural history when the enigmatic Leland Gaunt (Max von Sydow) opens his antique shop. Each item he sells is a talisman of desire, at a too good to be true price – in cash that is. As resident after resident exits his shop with their quaintly wrapped objet trouve, Sheriff Alan Pangborn (Ed Harris) starts to notice tensions bubbling over as Castle Rock’s myriad cold wars start to turn hot.
Heston’s adaptation keeps the beats of the novel intact but trades atmospheric pressure for accessibility. The creeping corruption spreading out for Gaunt’s boutique seeps into the town’s moral fibre gradually but inexorably in the novel, the seduction all the sweeter for the time it takes. It’s a landslide collapse that starts with a few grains of sand tumbling down a slope. The film, by contrast, plays like a row of dominos, a chain reaction that accelerates from the moment the first on topples. The escalating chaos remains entertaining, even clever in its orchestration, but the film has no time to breathe in the tension, events happen so fast there’s rarely time for the audience to feel complicit in the bargains being struck. It’s a distillation of the novel’s ideas rather than the full experience of them.
Von Sydow, however, makes the film worth the price of admission alone. His Gaunt is smooth as a polished mahogany coffin, charming and venomous in equal measure. He radiates the amused confidence of someone who’s seen humanity make the same mistake countless times, and never tires of the joy it brings him. Ed Harris brings his usual steel-edged sincerity to Pangborn, a character finally given the lead rather than another supporting role. The cast is built out with an impressively deep bench of character actors: Amanda Plummer, Bonnie Bedelia, Don S Davis and, of course, J T Walsh who powers the latter half of the film with his unravelling. They make the town of Castle Rock feel alive and lived in, even as it starts its slide into hell.
Patrick Doyle’s score lends a gothic heartbeat to the proceedings, and Heston’s eye for composition occasionally hints at something grander. But the film’s setting of Castle Rock never quite feels like the place from the novel, and Gaunt’s store itself seems too light, airy and elegant to be the curio boutique of the novel. Everything’s a little too tidy and, as the town tears itself apart, the destruction feels too choreographed, too structured.
So far, of all the adaptations I’ve reviewed during the Hail To The King season, this one hurts the most. It’s always been one of my personal favourites of King’s novels and somehow it’s worse that it ended up getting an adequate adaptation. A bad one could be dismissed. A great one would have been nice, of course. But this Needful Things is just good enough to make you aware of how great it could have been. Even within the film’s compression, though, enough of King’s fascination remains intact: ordinary people undone by their own bargains, evil operating not from the shadows but through everyday desire. Needful Things may not be the devil’s own masterpiece, but it’s a tempting little trinket all the same.
