One of few screen adaptations based on Stephen King's work that turns out to be really memorable.
It is a vital movie in Shaiman's work since this supposes his official start in a length movie for cinema and is, the confirmation of a happy collaboration with a sometimes brilliant director called Rob Reiner. It emerges as an atypical score in a work dominated by the comedy, the musical and the feelings.
The composer jokes: "Rob Reiner contracted me to compose the music in spite of the fact that I am an entertaining guy. Nothing on me was indicating him that I should be ok for this work, but he let guided for his own instinct."
The composer approached the score departing from a temp track replete of Jerry Goldsmiths music, which placed him in front to a hard challenge: to compose something denser than tunings in for television shows. The process, which was separated radically of the type of works that he had realized till then, supposed for him a kind of training, a learning, knowing that he could not inhale to emulate Jerry Goldsmith. Nobody would say that the result, a dense and terrifying score could be composed by a newcomer, and less that from an author with Shaiman's precedents.
A tense score, hard to be heard apart from the movie, too incidental, with minimal recognizable themes, that is based in a main tune from three notes, too simply and effective. This tense music only finds a brief peace in the musical passages dedicated to the unforgetteable roll starred by great Richard Fansworth.
Misery rises, so, as one of the most perfect works of the composer, and a clear proof of what is able to compose beyond the strict comedy to which he has been nearly limited for years.
The CD is out of print, fact that surprised to the own author, whose sense of the humor leads him to joke: "I will have to rescue a box replete with these CDs that I have in the garage, to make myself rich". It is necessary to emphasize that the special edition of the DVD contains a brief (and interesting) interview with the composer.

8.5