‘11.22.63’ Reviewed
The Hulu show, ‘11–22–63,’ starring James Franco and Chris Cooper and produced by JJ Abrams, is yet another in a long list of Stephen King adaptations, which, probably due to just how many of them that have been made, have a spotty track record. For every Shining, there’s Cujo. For every Shawshank Redemption, there’s Pet Cemetary. For every Carrie, there’s Christine.
Actually, the sheer volume of content that Stephen King has created is pretty stunning when you actually step back and look at it. How can one human be so prolific? I remember hearing an interview he did with Terry Gross a number of years back where he talked about where he got his ideas. He said that when he needs an idea for a story, he goes down into what he refers to as the basement of his mind (which, let’s be honest, sounds like a terrifying place), where there are these three blue-collar joes sitting in front of a filing cabinets. King asks them, “Anything for me today, guys?” Some days they open one of the cabinets and hand him something, some days they don’t. Seems like a reliable system to me. He should probably be paying those guys overtime. Or at least time-and-a-half.
In the case of ‘11–22–63,’ it looks like the guys handed him a winner. At least as far as the TV adaptation goes. As far as his writing goes… well, I know I’m probably going to put some people off here, but I do not like Stephen King’s writing. I tried. I tried to read “The Shining” more than once, and I just couldn’t get past the terrible prose. He’s a great story-teller, not so much as a writer. Direct your angry tweets to @stephancoxvoice.
In any event, the premise of 11–22–63 goes like this: a teacher and failed novelist living in present-day small-town Maine, Jake, played by James Franco, is alerted to the existence portal in a storage closet in a diner owned by his friend, Al, played by Chris Cooper. The portal takes you back to a particular moment in 1960 — October 21st, 1960, at 11:58 AM, to be exact. It doesn’t refer to the date of the title, which, as people who lived through it know, is the date of the Kennedy assassination.
Al, who is sick with lung cancer, tells Jake that he’s gone through the portal a number of times, always with the same goal: to try to prevent the assassination of JFK. But, because he’s sick, he can’t go again. He now needs Jake to go.
Now, if you’re shaking your head at this point, thinking, What an incredibly contrived setup, well, we have a lot in common, you and I. But remember how I said that Stephen King is a crappy writer but a great storyteller? That absolutely applies here. He’s got a pretty solid track record of taking iffy premises and smoothing them out beautifully.
For example, one of the problems that I’ve always had with time-travel stories is that once you open up the possibility of traveling through time, you’re immediately faced with way too many questions. Like, say, with the Terminator films. If, in the future, machines are able to go back in time and try to prevent the birth of John Connor by killing his mother, then why can’t someone else go back and prevent that machine from preventing the killing of Sarah Connor? (Which was the plot of Terminator 2, for those of you keeping score at home.) And then, why can’t the machines send another machine back earlier in time to prevent that machine from preventing the other machine from preventing the killing of Sarah Connor, thereby creating a series of infinite possible realities with infinite outcomes, which is sort of what the whole multiverse theory of reality that some physicists have postulated, and lord, just thinking about all that gives me a headache.
King has developed a set of nice, neat boundaries for all of that: first, the portal only goes to the same moment in time, every time. Okay. So there’s no jumping further back. Got it. Also, each time you step into the portal, you can stay as long as you like, only two minutes pass in the present. Okay. And then, in order to address what’s referred to as “the butterfly effect,” which essentially says that any small changes to the past might result in massive changes to the existing future, whenever a character gets too close to making a change that might disrupt things too much, he’s essentially prevented from doing it. In the words of Al, the diner owner, if you push too much at the past, the past pushes back.
What’s really at play here is that Al is determined to prevent Vietnam from escalating and tearing apart his generation, and he’s calculated that if JFK survives, you don’t get Johnson, who ramped up the war. And so, for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, Jake decides take up the task of going back in time to track and follow Lee Harvey Oswald and kill him, and the show revs to life and becomes engaging very quickly.
A lot of this, of course, has to do with executive producer JJ Abrams, who, like Stephen King, really knows how to tell a story, how to ratchet up the tension, and most of all, how to make a concept fun. And, yeah, the dialogue is stilted and stiff here and there — how could it not be with something this concept-heavy? — but with very capable actors like James Franco and Chris Cooper, you give it a pass, mostly because they go all in on the concept. It’s easy to forget that, with his ADD and myriad art projects and intellectual pursuits, that James Franco is first and foremost a tremendously gifted actor.
There are side stories that keep the show moving along, one involving a present day student of Jake’s, an older man originally from Dallas whose mother and sister, we learn, were killed by his father when he was a boy. And, naturally, there’s a love interest, a woman he meets named Sadie (played by Sarah Gadon), which further entangles him to the past. And, of course, there are plenty of fun moments about a man literally out of time trying to navigate the past, as well as a good amount of social commentary about the roles of women and minorities in the early ’60s, and about how much those roles have — and haven’t — changed.
Yes, it gets a little wonky here and there when it goes into the details about the murky circumstances around the JFK assassination (and how could it not?), but ultimately, ‘11–22–63’ is a solid, fun, and gripping show. Score one for the guys in the basement.
