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If
one had to pick a candidate for the most disappointing
horror movie of all time, the hands down choice would
be 1980’s The Shining. Considering that
the film was directed by Stanley Kubrick, who was probably
the greatest English language director working in the
cinema from the late 50’s through the mid 70’s, the
film’s ineptitude came as a profound shock to those
of us bowled over by such Kubrick genre masterpieces
as Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey
and A Clockwork Orange.
The
Shining
has one massive flaw--absolutely nothing happens in
the film. The plot literally boils down to this: ex-boozer/schoolteacher/“writer”
Jack Torrance becomes caretaker of a deserted Colorado
hotel, dragging along his whining telepathic son and
even more whiny wife. A mixture of cabin fever and evil
spirits cause Jack to go looney-tooney, killing off
the hotel’s telepathic cook (doesn’t every hotel have
one?) and nearly killing off his wife and telepathic
tot. Fortunately, the little twerp’s ESP abilities save
the day as he lures his father to a frozen death in
the hotel’s hedge maze. Mother and son escape in a Tucker
Sno-Cat as the audience is overwhelmed by 2 and 1/2
hours of ennui and sleep. Finis.
The
Stephen King novel the film was based on was overlong
and cliched, but at least it was eventful. The novel
contained some fine scattered moments of Grand Guginol--the
attack of the topiary animals, the boiler explosion,
Torrance bludgeoning himself with a croquet mallet,
etc. Properly cut down, the novel could have been
turned into a highly effective ghost thriller. Unfortunately,
that certainly wasn’t the case here, nor was it with
the 1997 TV miniseries remake of The Shining
(more on that later).
There
may be naysayers among you exclaiming, “Film and literature
are two separate mediums! One shouldn’t knock a film
for not being true to its source material!” True enough.
1951’s The Thing From Another World was Howard
Hawks' cinematic riff on John Campbell’s Who Goes
There? The film bore scant relation to the Campbell
story because Hawks felt what worked on the literary
page probably wouldn’t work on the soundstage. The film
was a viable work in its own right and is considered
by many to be one of the greatest sci-fi films of all
time. Deviation from a source material is not a cinematic
sin; lack of interest in a narrative is, and The
Shining commits this offense in spades.
About
now, the naysayers will be saying, “So what if the film’s
pacing limps along like a pregnant pachyderm?
The film is European in its methodical pacing and is
more interested in examining the tortured psyche of
Jack Torrance than in revealing screaming bogeymen lurking
around hotel corridors.” Well, this approach has
certainly worked in the past. Roman Polanski’s
1965 film Repulsion was a chilling, deliberately-paced
account of a woman’s descent into psychosis. The
crucial difference between Kubrick’s film and Polanski’s
is that the schizophrenic character Catherine Deneuve
portrays is of great interest to the audience; Nicholson’s
Jack Torrance is decidely not.
The
audience has trouble getting involved with Torrance
because we really don’t know what forces drive him over
the edge so quickly. A key example of this occurs early
in the film: Jack hurls a torrent of obscenities at
Wendy (Shelly Duvall) after she bursts into his room
while he’s working on a manuscript. There’s no indication
earlier in the film that such animosity existed between
Jack and Wendy; the outburst seems forced and arbitrary.
Kubrick gives no escalating buildup of tension between
the couple and the scene comes off as contrived. At
least in the King novel, some of Jack’s psychological
demons originated in a tortured childhood where Jack
was abused by an alcoholic father. No such character
delineation is touched upon in the Kubrick film.
One
of the most serious problems with The Shining
is that it simply fails to frighten. In fact, quite
the opposite occurs--many scenes are unintentionally
hysterical. Case in point: early on in the film, Danny
Torrance has a psychic flash-forward where he sees blood
flowing out of the Overlook hotel elevator and the murdered
twin girls standing in a corridor. Kubrick intercuts
this scene with a closeup of Danny Lloyd’s face contorted
in wide-eyed terror. The expression the child
displays is so over-the-top that it reminds one of a
shot from an early 20th century silent film, and it simply provokes
snickers from the audience.
Danny
Lloyd’s performance is another problem. His raspy
voicings of his telepathic friend “Tony,” (complete
with finger twitchings), are totally unconvincing.
His is one of the worst performances turned in by a
child actor in many years, yet one
can’t say that his performance could be blamed on his
youth. Witness the superb acting jobs done by
child stars Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens as the
ghostly possessed children in Jack Clayton’s superb
1961 film The Innocents (based on Henry James
The Turn of the Screw). Their totally
convincing performances helped turn the Clayton film
into a shattering experience and makes the Kubrick film
look like a stroll in the park by comparison.
An equally brilliant job by a child actor in a similar
role was turned in by Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth
Sense.
Many
scenes in the film that are supposed to convey suspense
fail miserably. One is unsure if Kubrick is unaware
of how to create tension in a horror film or if he is
just tweaking the noses of horror film fans by making
certain scenes drag on interminably. Perhaps he took
a derisive view of the original novel and the horror
genre in general, and decided to bore the crap out of
the audience. If that was his intention, he succeeded
admirably.
The
directorial ineptitude of the film is highlighted in
the sequence where the black telepath Halloran (Scatman
Crothers) is rushing to the Overlook in a snowbound
rescue attempt while Jack Torrance murderously stalks
his wife and child. The scenes in this sequence drag
on at a ponderous pace; where sequences should have
been furiously intercut, we are instead treated to innumerable
shots of snow covered highways.
The
climactic sequence where Jack stalks Danny in the hedge
maze is also devoid of suspense, presenting nothing
more than a series of technically adroit but unbearably
dull stedicam shots tracking the two actors. A film
that exploited a similar sequence in a far more effective
manner was William Cameron Menzies 1954 film The
Maze. It’s amazing that a low budget film which
contains Richard Carlson being menaced by a man in a
giant frog suit in a hedge maze could be more frightening
then The Shining, but even with its low budget
limitations, The Maze puts Kubrick’s film to
shame.
What
many of the more perceptive critics fail to realize
is that even cinema’s greatest directors turn out a
turkey now and then. This has certainly been the case
with such diverse artists as Hitchcock, Ford and Wyler.
Such a film need not do damage to a great director’s
canon of work; he merely bounces back and produces a
film in his usual brilliant style. Such was the case
with Kubrick. He followed The Shining with
Full Metal Jacket, one of his best films, a
surreal masterpiece that remains the best of the Vietnam
war films.
The
film was of such high quality one wondered how he could
have stumbled so badly on The Shining.
Apparently, this was not a lone opinion--no less than
Stephen King said he was “horrified” at the liberties
taken in the Kubrick version of his novel, which prompted
him to do the aforementioned 1997 remake. Though
more faithful to the source material, the TV version
was as big a disaster as big screen predecessor.
What is it about this book that results in movie and
TV versions so resoundingly awful?
See
ya soon.
Steve
can be reached at steve@babblog.com.
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