Stanley Kubrick (1980)
Widely regarded as a great horror movie, The Shining is rather an example of superlative film-making technique not being enough. The title sequence is vertiginous: the spectacular Colorado landscape is seen from far above and the lone car on the road below is strikingly, vulnerably tiny – yet the movement of the images, photographed by John Alcott, makes this God’s-eye view deeply unstable. The Steadicam shots in the snowbound Overlook Hotel, where nearly all the action takes place, are similarly disorienting – the effect is underlined by the ferociously patterned carpets and by the sound of the young boy Danny (Danny Lloyd)’s little scooter rattling over uncovered flooring then switching into the noiselessness of the carpeted areas. A scene like the one in which the elderly chef Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) shows Danny and his mother Wendy (Shelley Duvall) round the kitchen larder and deep freeze is compelling and unnerving – with the maze of tins and packets, the hanging sides of meat, the rhythm of Scatman Crothers’ descriptions of them, the underlying silence.
But it’s clear at a very early stage that, not for the first time in a Kubrick film, the people are going to be a relative disappointment. Jack Nicholson is Jack Torrance, a blocked writer who, with his wife and son, takes a job as caretaker of the Overlook during the winter months when the hotel’s closed. Jack hopes the peace and quiet will get him writing again. In his interview with the hotel manager (Barry Nelson), he learns that one of his predecessors as caretaker got ‘cabin fever’ and killed his family and himself. Nicholson receives the news with impressively dead eyes but the eyebrows are soon raised so high they look to be chasing his receding hairline up his skull. Nicholson telegraphs Jack Torrance’s madness. He’s OK (although unsurprising, even thirty years ago) when the madness is (just) under a joker façade but he doesn’t find a way of distinguishing this pretend-crazy side of Torrance from the real craziness that takes over. When Torrance gets seriously insane, Nicholson is hollow – and not disturbing because you’re always so conscious of his performance (and so is he). Shelley Duvall isn’t bad as the hapless wife Wendy but it’s impossible to believe in her and Nicholson as a couple – so that, when Jack disintegrates, you don’t feel there’s anything being destroyed. As Danny, six-year-old Danny Lloyd has a natural weirdness which gives him a convincing kinship with the twin daughters of the caretaker who went mad and killed the girls, in spite of the fact that Danny is terrified by his bloody visions of them.
Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay, written with Diane Johnson, is adapted from the novel by Stephen King. Kubrick’s use of music in his two previous pictures, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, was marvellous. The electronic notes from Berlioz’s ‘Dies Irae’ at the beginning of The Shining promise more of the same but Kubrick is surprisingly profligate in the use of music here, including the score supplied by Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos and produced by Rachel Elkind: the effect becomes less scary than oppressive. After an hour, we fast-forwarded to the famous climax just to see and hear the bits that have become so famous (‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’, ‘Honey, I’m home’, little pigs and the wolf, and ‘Heeere’s Johnny!’). I know it’s not fair to say this when you’ve skipped half the film but the climax of The Shining, apart from Torrance’s shocking murder of Hallorann, is grimly monotonous.
31 May 2011
