http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/arts/television/big-driver-a-stephen-king-story-comes-to-lifetime.html 2014-10-17 20:58:30 ‘Big Driver,’ a Stephen King Story, Comes to Lifetime “Big Driver,” on Lifetime, is based on a Stephen King short story about a mystery novelist seeking vengeance on the truck driver who raped her. === In “ “ The stories are similar and yet, as rendered on screen, they are not at all comparable. Maria Bello plays Tess Thorne, a mystery writer who tells no one about her attack, and instead uses her experience writing fiction to wreak vengeance on the rapist, a little like a feminine version of Charles Bronson’s character in the “Death Wish” movies. But Tess is no Charles Bronson. If anything, she is a younger version of Jessica Fletcher in Rape is an especially heinous crime anywhere, not just on “Law & Order: SVU.” It’s impossible to take lightly, and that is one reason that “Big Driver,” while genuinely frightening and suspenseful, is also disturbing in the wrong way. Mr. King is an amazingly prolific writer, but he is probably best known for blending the supernatural and the slyly satirical, whether it’s in “Carrie” or “The Shining” or “Under The Dome.” “Big Driver,” like “Misery,” mixes the shocking but not impossible with the all too familiar. But in this kind of crime, which is vividly depicted in the movie, a light touch rings all the wrong notes. Maria Bello is a talented actress, and she does her best to keep Tess credible. But Tess is a quirky heroine who talks to the GPS unit in her car and calls it “Tom.” In her head, she hears one of her book characters, Doreen (Olympia Dukakis), advising her on how to get away with murder. The kookiness clashes too sharply with the brutality of the crime. “Misery,” which starred James Caan as Paul, the writer, and Kathy Bates as Annie, his kidnapper, was not without humor. The joke was an inside one: a perverse metaphor for the miseries of genre writers who want to be taken seriously. Paul wants to give up his romances and write other fiction. When Annie realizes that he plans to kill off his most beloved heroine, Misery Chastain, she demands that he rewrite his draft to keep Misery alive. It was a seriously weird and scary movie, and Ms. Bates won an Oscar for her performance. But the director, Rob Reiner, insisted on tamping down the violence of the novel in the film version. In the book, Annie hacks off the writer’s foot with an ax, but Mr. Reiner apparently considered that too extreme for movie audiences, and instead had her break both his ankles. That made the faint underlay of whimsy tolerable. “Big Driver” is slimmer in content, as well as form, than “Misery,” but it is nonetheless gripping. The television adaptation, however, doesn’t adjust for the power of a graphic depiction of assault, rape and sodomy. And that violence, when juxtaposed with the jaunty, Cabot Cove tone, undercuts the movie’s message of payback and empowerment. “Big Driver” is scary, but not always for the right reasons.