Get a move on, Stanley!

Rating: Null/10 (23 May 2003)

The rise and fall of a lusty Irish adventurer and social climber determined to sleep his way to the top in 18th Century Europe.
Elephantine Stanley Kubrick adaptation of Thackery's novel containing all his characteristic detail and realism and equally characteristic flatness and emotional distance.
As usual with Kubrick, every frame is painstakingly composed and lingered over in tribute to its own craftsmanship. Actors, landscapes, props and even the weather are designed to emphasise the words DIRECTOR IN CHARGE. From a cold, technical perspective its all very impressive and polished, with a clinical auteur in evident control throughout. Kubrick doesn't so much tell a story as present a lecture in film craft; no wonder the arthouse critics and film academics love him. But there's about as much life, spontaneity, joy and emotional connection in this film as in a dead lab rat; especially in the last hour when Kubrick's attempts to engineer some audience sympathy with his anti-hero are cringeworthy.
The acting? Well it never does get much of a chance with Stanley does it? Ryan O'Neal always was pretty wooden but you can almost feel his boredom as Kubrick puts him through the wringer of take after take, with the drained and laboured results so typical of his later films. Now here's a director who really would have loved digitally created performers to manipulate like a micro-surgeon.