Lifetime's "Big Driver" now joins "Misery," "The Shining" and "Secret Window" in the Stephen King collection of stories about authors going bonkers.
Here, Maria Bello's successful crime novelist Tess Thorne has a particularly awful reason to become unhinged: she's been brutally assaulted and left for dead. (This is not a spoiler; it's the movie's opening shot.)
Flashing back, we see Tess driving to a reading; her series of books about a group of mystery-solving elderly women is highly popular, and in this small Massachusetts town, Ramona (Ann Dowd) is both the head of her fan base and an expert on local shortcuts.
She steers Tess onto a back road to save time on her return trip, whereupon the author promptly gets a flat and flags down the wrong pickup truck to ask for help.
Tess' violent rape at the hands of an enormous redneck (Will Harris), which goes on long and up-close enough to qualify as gratuitous, ends with her being left unconscious and bloodied in a drainage tunnel.
When she manages to get home, she flirts with the idea of calling 911, but instead begins a conversation with the vengeance-minded voices in her head — the same voices that have kept her on the best-seller lists.
Maria Bellow, left, and Will Harris star in Lifetime's "Big Driver."
Minus the authorial flourish, we've seen the rape-revenge thing many times before, and with better production and writing budgets.
Bello is an engaging presence, but she's above this material. Ditto Ann Dowd. I can't say as much for rocker Joan Jett, though it's still a kick to see her brief appearance as a weathered barkeep with a glass eye.
Tess takes matters into her own hands when she's raped by a truck driver.Photo: Chris Reardon
And there's poor Olympia Dukakis, turning up in the back seats of cars and around corners as Doreen, Tess' fictional voice of wisdom, bestowing on her bon mots like "soonest begun, soonest done." (Sometimes King's folksy sayings translate well to screen dialogue; here, not so much.)
This strong cast makes the movie an obvious choice for Lifetime, but that doesn't guarantee its female-empowerment status.
There's an essential implausibility to Tess' reactions — and while it might, in a different genre, have been amusing to watch her developing an in-depth internal relationship with the voice in her GPS, the fact that it follows a traumatic rape feels way off, tonally.
"Big Driver" can't seem to decide if it's a straight-up thriller or a dark comedy about what writing about murder for years does to a person's brain.
It's a line King often walks with finesse in his stories, but doesn't always survive the leap to the screen since he's usually not writing the screenplay.
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