Kubrick delivers one way or another.

Rating: Null/10 (11 March 2006)

Rare is the film that is better then its inspiration in literature, but THE SHINING (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) must be among the handful that meet that criteria. Director Stanley Kubrick takes a lot of liberties with Stephen King's storyline, but the end result resonates more powerfully then the author's novel.
Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall are Jack and Wendy Torrance, who have agreed to care take a spectacular hotel in the mountains of Colorado over the course of the winter. They are accompanied by their son Danny, here portrayed by talented child actor Danny Lloyd. Danny was born with a caul on his face, which, according to folklore makes him a recipient of psychic gifts that a family acquaintance, the hotel cook Dick Holloran (Scatman Crothers) calls "shining".
The problem is that the Hotel Overlook is a vast barn of a hotel, overflowing with the chimerical shadows of a long, violent history. And young Danny and his powers become the object of the malevolent institution's want. Jack is slowly turned against his family, as was his predecessor, hotel caretaker Delbert Grady, who butchered his children with an axe and stacked their bodies like cord wood in the hotel's west wing. Grady is among the many spectral energies that still inhabit the Overlook, and the entire phantasmic location is one that can draw sustenance from Jack Torrance's past, one soaked in alcohol abuse and the fear of further destroying his life and career. Jack left behind him in Vermont a career as a ritzy private boy's school teacher, which he forfeited through the beating of a student during a drunken rage. He tinkers with an unfinished novel between dry drunk episodes.
It's a potboiler storyline, in short. Robert Wise made something roughly similar work fifteen years before when he took Shirley Jackson's vastly superior book THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and turned it into the classic THE HAUNTING. Stanley Kubrick's task was far more daunting, and he grasps King's excessive style and transforms it into a clever "wrinkle in time" narrative. For those who are looking for loyalty to a novel's plot line, THE SHINING can only be a disappointment. But if you like Kubrick, and admire his versatility in expressing the brittleness and desolation of the modern day, this movie should work. The worst flaw of the work is the destruction of the one black character in the storyline, proving that even directors as advanced as Kubrick can fall into clichÃ©'.
Recent releases of the film on both VHS and DVD have included a documentary on the making of the piece, which offers a warts and all take on what it was like for this particular cast to work together with some special focus on Jack Nicholson and his interestingly quirky contributions to style in performance. THE SHINING is good on a number of levels, and holds up well in the quarter century since its release. Watch for a certain elevator terror during the chase scene. It's a strikingly beautiful and powerful image that condenses the theme of the original work in a few hundred frames.