A Death in the Family

"Umney's Last Case" episode of the Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King

Directed by Rob Bowman
Written by April Smith
Starring William H. Macy

In presenting the second week of Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King , TNT has paired a strong episode with a weak one just as they did the first week. In week one, the powerful “Battleground” was followed by the drawn-out and aimless “Crouch End.” In week two, the brilliant “Umney's Last Case” is paired with the wholly unnecessary “The End of the Whole Mess.” Interestingly, each of the strong episodes is led by an actor who is older and less pretty, but deeply skilled, and the weak episodes have younger, more photogenic lightweights leading their casts.

But the paired stories are quite different. While first week's episodes were both in the classic horror vein, the second week's are from quite different genres. This is appropriate since King writes stories of so many types. Here we have one science fiction story and another story in the style of hardboiled detective fiction – although it has a twist that puts it into the weird fantasy realm.

Although “Umney's Last Case” in both its short story and April Smith's teleplay adaptation resists easy summary, the general outline can be sketched out. Clyde Umney is a private eye in Los Angeles in the late 1930's. His world is rolling along fine, and then he notices people and places begin to change in irrational ways. Very quickly all the things he has relied on as true and lasting fall away. Then he is visited by the owner of his office building, who turns out to be Sam Landry, a novelist who in fact invented Umney and his entire world. Landry's own world has become too painful for him to live in. His six year old son Danny has died in a tragic accident. In King's written version Danny has died of AIDS contracted in a blood transfusion. In the teleplay Danny has drowned in the family's swimming pool. Sam and his wife have become estranged, unable to help each other due to the weight of their individual grief. So Sam has been making the changes in Umney's world that have upset him so. Because Sam has a plan: he is going to leave his world behind and live in Umney's world. So Umney has to go.

So far, this may sound like fairly standard Outer Limits or Twilight Zone fare. But this is a story so rich in both its original and in the teleplay, that this barely scratches the surface. The changes that the teleplay makes to the short story are a rare instance of an adaptation enhancing and expanding on the original's thematic content. Some changes work mainly on the level of visual interest. The teleplay wisely shows us Clyde Umney living out a typical day of his existence as a tough guy PI straight out of hardboiled novels (Raymond Chandler is of course referenced here) and classic film noir. In the story, King immediately begins to show Umney's world starting to erode from the changes we later learn that author Landry is making.

But by focusing on the positive before giving us the negative, the teleplay shows us what is compelling about Umney's world. With William H. Macy hamming it up delightfully as a cliché of every 1940's film noir we have ever seen, the show gives us Umney loving and leaving dames, shooting it out with blackmailers and dopers, cracking cases, and boozing away with style. Umney is blitheness itself: he belittles, uses, and abuses the people around him, and it's all just the trademark of the loveable rogue of his era. The version here is so hackneyed as to be almost a cartoon, but attractive and nostalgic for all its silliness. The depiction may seem to be insulting to the genre of hardboiled fiction that the story seems to celebrate. But this is not the point. If Umney's world is shallow, it is compelling because it is shallow. Life there is easier, less complicated, and less real, with all the pain that reality brings.

Then the teleplay shows what King's story describes from the start, the erosion of Umney's comfortable world. First Vernon , the “tough old bird” who operates the elevator in Umney's building, turns out to be retiring. For Umney, this is impossible because he lives in the timeless world of fiction where such changes simply do not occur. As he says, Vern is supposed to be the elevator operator forever. Worse than this intrusion of time is the intrusion of ugly real-life consequences which Umney has never faced before: Vern is retiring because he has the Big C, cancer. Vern is a chain smoker but he is also paying for all those damned cigarettes they smoked in film noir that gave such a misty, murky ambience to everything. That ambience is replaced by the terrifying visual of Vern pulling a cigarette from his mouth and looking at the end turned red by the blood coming from his lungs. Later in his office, Umney is dealt another blow. His secretary has quit because she is tired of being just another hot dame for Umney's roaming hands. It's as if feminism has blossomed overnight and Umney is left in the past, a childish reminder of a less sensitive time.

In Umney's office, Sam Landry makes his appearance to finally explain what has been going on. Macy shows his acting chops – no surprise to anyone who has seen him work – as he makes Landry as nuanced and natural as Umney is clichéd and over the top. And as the story develops, he manages to deepen Umney as well.

In King's written version, Landry explains most everything to Umney in a long conversation. In the teleplay, much of this is acted out, not just because this is a more visual medium, but because in seeing Landry and, more importantly, his wife Linda deal with the death of Danny, their characters are fleshed out and the theme is made more complex. And a change in the order of events adds to this. In King's story, Linda has committed suicide a year after Danny's death and long before Landry comes up with his plan to change places with Umney. In the teleplay those events are reversed.

On the simplest level, the theme is escape and how one can use work to escape from dealing with pain. Although this can happen to anyone from any walk of life, King seems to be saying that writers are particularly suited to this form of cowardice because in longing for a world without consequences, they can use their imagination to create one. And they may be more prone to it because as Landry says, writers are the most self-centered people in the world. But just as Landry wishes to be Umney, his wife Linda wishes to be saved by Umney. He is a man of clear action and uncomplicated sexuality. She can look to him for strength and support because unlike her husband, Umney needs nothing in return. In his world there is no loss because “things aren't supposed to change.”

But things around us do change, and it is people who remain constant. As Umney himself says, “Character is destiny.” So in Umney's world, Landry makes a poor detective. In his conversations with a client, he keeps revising what he says, keeps on being a writer in other words. And Umney makes a poor replacement husband for Linda since his character is that of a philanderer. And as for Linda, in an emotionally wrenching and visually stunning scene, she commits suicide by leaping from a building. While in King's story, her suicide is one of the causes for Landry's need to escape his old life, in the teleplay, Landry's escape becomes one of the causes of her suicide. And so escapism not only keeps us from dealing with hard reality, it keeps us from helping those who depend on us.

by Robin Graves
web-only review