Tries to have the best of both worlds, and ends up with the best of neither

Rating: 5/10 (14 July 2016)

Jack Torrance, a writer, applies for a job as winter caretaker at an isolated hotel. The hotel is set high in the mountains, a long way from the nearest town, and is normally cut off by snow during the winter. Jack, who wants the solitude in order to concentrate on his writing, accepts the position, even though he has been warned by the hotel manager that a previous caretaker, Charles Grady, went mad and killed his family and himself. When we hear that we know exactly how the plot will pan out. Jack will go mad and start attacking his wife Wendy and their young son Danny.
I love Stanley Kubrick, whom I regard as one of the greatest directors of all time. I love "Paths of Glory", "Spartacus", "Doctor Strangelove", "A Clockwork Orange" and "Eyes Wide Shut", all of which I regard as masterpieces, with "Lolita", "Barry Lyndon" and "Full Metal Jacket" not far behind. I don't love "The Shining", which I regard as one of Kubrick's rare failures. I realise that I am in the minority on that score, although I would probably have been in the majority when it was first released in 1980. Many critics at the time disliked it and although it was not nominated for a single Oscar or Golden Globe, it earned Kubrick his only "Worst Director" Razzie nomination. (Shelley Duvall was also nominated as "Worst Actress"). Since then critical thinking seems to have shifted and the film is regularly ranked among Kubrick's best, but watching it again recently, for the first time in a number of years, has not persuaded me to revise my generally unfavourable impression of it.
Before I set out my criticisms of the film, let me first say what I liked about it. Jack Nicholson, who had earlier won an Oscar for portraying another mentally disturbed character in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", is excellent as the tormented Jack. (I was less taken with Duvall). There is some excellent photography of the mountain scenery, and Kubrick's shots of the eerie, deserted hotel are often highly atmospheric.
Kubrick's previous film, "Barry Lyndon", had been criticised for being too long and slow-moving, and was a box-office failure in America. He therefore decided that his next film should be both a critical and a commercial success, and hit on the horror genre, possibly influenced by the fact that horror films like "The Exorcist" and "The Omen" were very much in vogue in the seventies. I have always felt, however, that his style of film-making was not well-suited to horror. It was in my view admirably suited to a historical epic like "Barry Lyndon", but horror has generally been a genre which requires something tauter, leaner and faster-moving than Kubrick was used to. "The Shining", at least in the cut released in America, ended up nearly two and a half hours long; the British and European version, with which I am more familiar, is 25 minutes shorter, but even that seems overlong and to move at a glacial pace. Although, as I said, Kubrick is often able to conjure up a disturbing atmosphere, that atmosphere is too often dissipated when nothing happens.
One of the film's critics in 1980 was Stephen King, the author of the novel on which it is based. I have never read the book, so am unable to enter into the controversy about whether or not the film is faithful to it, but some of King's other criticisms seem justified. King disliked what he saw as the ambiguity of the film. He stated in an interview that his story was definitely a tale of the supernatural, of the "sheer inhuman evil" haunting the hotel. He felt that Kubrick, whom he described as a "visceral skeptic" and "a man who thinks too much and feels too little", was unable to grasp this and therefore sought to locate the evil within Jack's own personality.
Now there would be nothing wrong with a film about a man who is driven to madness by loneliness and isolation and who, in his insanity, believes that he is seeing ghosts. That interpretation, however, does not really work here because there are other elements in the story which do indeed point to a supernatural explanation. It is not just Jack who sees the ghosts; Danny can see them as well. The hotel appears to be haunted by not just the ghosts of the Grady family, who died in 1970, but by spectres from an earlier period, the 1920s. It is said to have been built on an Indian burial ground. (Has there ever been an American ghost story which does not involve Indian burial grounds?) Indeed, the film's very title has a supernatural meaning. Danny discovers that he possesses psychic abilities, something he shares with the hotel's elderly chef Mr Halloran; "shining" is Halloran's term for these powers.
I felt that "The Shining" could have worked as a straightforward ghost story, with Jack's violent behaviour explained in terms of possession by paranormal forces. (I am generally as sceptical as Kubrick about such matters, but am prepared to leave my scepticism at the cinema door). It could have worked as a straightforward psychological thriller, with the ghosts and apparitions which seem to haunt the hotel explained in terms of the delusions of a deranged mind. Kubrick, however, tries to keep hold of both possibilities, with the result that the film ends up muddled and confusing, with no satisfactory explanation ever being given. Ambiguity can sometimes be an artistic strength, but here it is more of a weakness. "The Shining" tries to have the best of both worlds, and ends up with the best of neither. 5/10