Week of November 7, 2007, Issue #629
FILM
Retrospective reveals the flaws of Kubrick
JOSEF BRAUN / josef@vueweekly.com
I was taken aback when I’d recently read in Catching the Big Fish that David Lynch considers Stanley Kubrick to be one of his all-time favourite filmmakers. It’s hardly as though I’m unaware of Kubrick’s importance, that I haven’t felt moments of awe or been greatly entertained while watching Kubrick’s films. But Lynch is one of my all-time favourite filmmakers, and it surprised me that he’d single out Kubrick for such praise in a very slim book where only a handful of filmmakers are mentioned.Kubrick’s films knocked me out when I was very young, but as I got older, his shortcomings seemed to inflate. He was inventive, witty, a superb craftsman, he cultivated some of movies’ most chilling moods and possessed of a singular eye for tectonic visual design. But his talents are tempered by a nagging soullessness. As his career progressed, an increasing dearth of deeper purpose permeates the work. I state these reservations because Kubrick was indeed in some ways a great filmmaker, so it seems reasonable to address what kinds of greatness he lacked.
Of the seven films screening in Metro Cinema’s The Films of Stanley Kubrick, titles such as the oft-revived Dr Strangelove (1964) or 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) seemed less urgent to revisit. I consider 2001 to be pretty much a masterpiece and said so in these pages a few years back when Metro last screened it. Instead, I’m going to look at two later films, ones I hadn’t seen in a while but soon realized were exactly the films that unfortunately exemplify Kubrick’s less appealing traits.
Based on Stephen King’s novel, The Shining (1980) freaked the shit out of me as a little kid. Funny thing is, it should really go down as one of the greatest failures of suspense storytelling in film history. The fact that it actually scares people—or at least children—just proves that atmosphere, which emanates from The Shining like a relentless sweat, goes a hell of a long way toward inflicting unease, even in the absence of momentum.
In his iconic role as Jack Torrence, the blocked writer and winter custodian of the isolated Overlook Hotel, Jack Nicholson gives his most flamboyantly self-indulgent—and, one suspects, drug-addled—performance, one tiresome in its sprawling inflections and gestures, yet undeniably fun for those willing to sit through it. Nicholson’s Torrence seems like an absolute nutjob from the first moment he appears on screen, so its hardly going to shock anybody when he gets cabin fever and comes after his family with an axe.
Like Nicholson, Shelly Duvall is a wonderful actor, but as Torrence’s suffering wife, she mostly gobbles in fear in godawful sweaters and I defy anyone to figure out how these two could possibly pass as a couple. The real performance to sit back and admire, oddly enough, is that of Danny Lloyd, who plays Torrence’s little boy, tormented by involuntary visions of the hotel’s legacy of murder, those blood-bursting elevators and Diane Arbus twins. Kubrick never seems more focused in his attention to the actors than when he simply fixes his camera on Danny’s face frozen in terror, or on Danny’s little finger wiggling as he’s possessed by “the boy inside my mouth.”
Ultimately, Kubrick seems most interested in corridors and labyrinths, which he inhabits with singular expertise. It’s just difficult to see how such elements add up to a movie, especially a 142-minute long horror movie. You have to wonder if Kubrick even wanted to make a horror movie, so plain is his disinterest in the story’s psychological nuance and development, so comedic are the scenes of actual corporeal threat.
Likewise, you’ve got to wonder what motivated Kubrick to make Full Metal Jacket (1987), his adaptation of Gustav Hansford’s Vietnam War novel. It’s been said a million times before and I can’t disagree with the consensus: it all goes downhill after basic training. “Did your parents have any children that lived?” R Lee Ermey’s Drill Instructor memorably asks Vincent D’Onofrio’s would-be marine, porky, dopey, much tread-upon, yet conspicuously handy with an assault rifle. It’s no surprise Ermey was a drill instructor in real life, he’s such a convincingly over-the-top hard-ass, a guy who actually boasts without a trace of irony how the Marine Corps trained Lee Harvey Oswald. But it’s also no surprise that D’Onofrio flips out and kills the son of a bitch, which closes the film’s first and by far most compelling section.
From this point Full Metal Jacket, having lost the Drill Instructor—the character that seems most closely aligned with Kubrick—sticks to Matthew Modine’s sly but dull war journo. His occasional voice-over narration only proves that he’s not that inspired a writer and his ostensible sensitivity to fraud and injustice has no effect on the overall shameless exoticization of the Vietnamese that clings to the film. Even the scenes of combat seem to have left Kubrick unaffected, disconnected from either the small picture of human agony or the big one of violent spectacle. V
Sun, Nov 11, 18, & 25 (1 pm)
The Films of Stanley Kubrick
Featuring Dr Strangelove, The Shining,
A Clockwork Orange and more
Metro Cinema, $10