The Horror From Kubrick

Rating: 10/10 (13 January 2000)

The Shining for Kubrick is about the mystery of places and people. The people staying at the Overlook, the Torrances, but also the Overlook and the sense of ghosts who perhaps know all too well their accursed fate. It's also a work of mad genius, cribbing King's book (which was scary and moody on its own if heavy on exposition) for the sake of giving a viewer a sense of total and unnerving dread. It's perhaps also a really great 'ordinary people are not what they seem' saga. And about writing and Jack Nicholson.
With Nicholson's performance, by the way, it's meant to be such a GIANT performance, and it either gets to you or it doesn't. This is a BIG performance that ranks with the likes of a Noh theater production, as if Nicholson had a touch of Mifune in Throne of Blood surrounded by those ghosts of Macbeth. We only gets hints about this man's sanity early on, then his growing boredom, and then a sense of, really, what the hell is going on with this guy. In the book it's made much more explicit: the hotel's gotten to him, it's in fact taken him over, in order to get to the boy. In the movie you can't be sure of it, because Kubrick and Nicholson keep you guessing, even as what you see is what you think you got.
Also, Shelley Duvall is underrated here; it's a performance that's perhaps not as great as Nicholson's, but that's because she's Wendy isn't the one the hotel gets to, at least in the same way it does for Jack Torrance. It's an exagerration of what one would expect a normal everyday mother- who also happens to live with and brush aside domestic abuse and alcoholism, or try to bear with is as she can- to react in this environment. It was said Kubrick pushed Duvall quite hard during the production, and it shows for all the best effect. In fact the Shining film wouldn't be so great if it weren't for pushing hard against what is possible. It taps into the soul of the book but translates for a medium that needs spatial sense, the thread of ambiguity (which can be a no-no for some filmmakers but for Kubrick is nothing short of mandatory) while presenting us with really disturbing things.
It's not particularly a film to show to a nine year old, but I saw it when I was nine anyway, and was moved, confused, running-out-of-the-house freaked-out (woman in bathtub, seriously), and knowing deep down I was experiencing some visceral thing here. The camera, the little girls, the music, the "all work and no play", the hedge maze, Nicholson, all of it comes together in one of those ultimate tales that makes perfect sense and no sense at all. It also gives the chance to ask questions, which the book, as amazing as it is, didn't let you do. Film as a medium gets a brooding kick in the nuts by the Shining.