Cold and Empty

Rating: 3/10 (1 November 2019)

Stephen King, like horror's other Maine man HP Lovecraft, has at best a patchy record when it comes to successful transfers of his work to the screen. Ironically, it is often the least faithful adaptions that make for the more effective and satisfying pictures.
What can be said, then, about this film? An adaptation of King's dense and personal novel that dumps about 80% of the book's narrative detail, substituting arty visuals and sub-Hitchcockian compositions for anything resembling a developed script or well-rounded characters, preserving the superficial elements and iconography of the book, but failing to provide any compelling hook on which to hang it's virtuoso production values. The product of a notoriously painstaking, difficult (mostly due to the director's auteurish fastidiousness) and long-drawn-out shoot, this version of The Shining is undoubtedly beautiful to look at, sumptuously shot and packed with minute visual detail. Where it falls down is in its near-complete absence of compelling human drama, with characters so thinly drawn as to be almost translucent, and an incredible, overripe lead performance by Jack Nicholson.
As the blocked writer who accepts a job as winter caretaker of The Overlook hotel in the picturesque Colorado mountains, slowly succumbing to the hotel's evil influence as snow and isolation draw in, Nicholson's performance is possibly one of the most spectacularly misjudged lead portrayals in American cinema. No slow, detailed progression from calm family man to unhinged, axe-swinging maniac for Jack it seems. Rather, he comes across as a man teetering on the brink right from the get-go, making the simple announcement that he has an appointment with the manager of the hotel seem like a veiled threat. Shelley Duvall fairs a little better as his beleaguered wife, but it's clear Kubrick sees her mainly as a prop, there to be placed in peril, scream and cry and suffer hysterics.
As in command as he is of the film's aesthetic aspects, Kubrick shows himself seemingly incapable of handling the ordinary business of building a narrative, or of drawing layered performances from his heavyweight cast. If reports from the shoot are to be believed, Kubrick's relentless perfectionism forced as many as 120+ takes on his actors in certain scenes. How then to account for the stilted, one-dimensional nature of the family's early interactions, or Nicholson's obviously unhinged manner from their very first arrival at the hotel? While never known for his restraint, Nicholson goes full bore here, and the effect - although occasionally chilling - is weirdly self-conscious and distant. Similarly, if he is to be credited for the picture's fine qualities, then Kubrick must also bear responsibility for its gaping flaws; the sloppy structure, the jarring whip-pans and clumsy crash-zooming, the conspicuously English accents of all the ghostly Overlook staff and guests despite the Colorado setting (betraying the fact of its actual production on a London soundstage), the choppy editing, the melodramatic musical score, the emotional vacuity and absence of feeling in the human relationships, and the general sense of paralysis that permeates the whole project, as if the director's exacting standards had so intimidated everyone involved that they could only follow his strict commands, and all creative energy was effectively beaten out of them.
By its final frames, this film has inspired neither terror nor sympathy, neither interest nor tension, but has merely served as an exemplary lesson in the folly of directorial arrogance, and a cautionary to the dangers of forgetting, or deliberately neglecting to tell, an actual story.