The Shining (1980)

Rating: 6/10 (6 May 2009)

Winter is my favorite season of the year. It slows and hushes everything down quite a bit. Sends some of the crowds indoors. It's calming and peaceful. Apparently, some movie writers find it to be tense and panic-inducing because there are a quite a few horror films set in the winter. Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of The Shining focuses on the idea of a "cabin fever" effect that drives a person crazy and makes them want to kill others. Why? Because killers are supposed to be scary (though they rarely in fact are, unless they're actually coming after you at this moment) and Stephen King wrote it. That's pretty much all there is to it, though the hotel the characters stay in seems to be haunted. I usually hate this kind of movie. But Kubrick's version of The Shining seems to know one thing and I agree with it- ghosts are boring. At least the ones that make women go misty-eyed and shake a few objects, creating strange noises, and that a character makes a discovery that there's a presence in the house and spirits are not at rest, so the house needs to be exorcised. Films like The Haunting and The Uninvited. Snoozefests, for lack of a better word. Films so focused on drama, they lack a credible threat and overly pad the long-winded dialogue with weepy revelations. And if you're lucky, they throw a little atmosphere your way. When they're not too busy making the main characters cry into a teacup. That sort of thing.
This version of The Shining attempts to be pulse-pounding, inexplicable, headily atmospheric, and filled to the brim with creepy images. It's refreshingly straight-forward and highly eventful. But in it's more visceral horror sequences, I can't help feeling they got a bit too gratuitous. The film's world-famous bathroom scene, set in cursed Room 237, for example. That almost feels tacked on for the purpose of a gross, cheap scare. I felt those ghost horror films which came before lacked directness. This film lacks simplicity and definitely overdoes it. Now, that's not saying that most of the horror in the film is unsuccessful. The reverse is true. Just a few select moments. Along the lines of sexual perversity. To burst the bubble of the film's college-student fan club (even the ones who've long since passed on from those days still have much the same attitude, but with potentially less hair), The Shining isn't perfect or a masterpiece. Not by far. Not just for the reason I previously mentioned, although that's certainly a biggie. And of course, on that subject- the film is nearly two and a half hours long. When you watch a horror movie that long, especially one whose intention was solely to creep you out... you have to wonder how films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre managed to do the same thing better in half the time. The budget is high and the crew is strictly professional. So, yeah they can afford to buy you a lot of nice things to look at. On a technical level, the film's stunning. But that's just the outer shell.
What about the inside? In the middle, The Shining is a terribly hollow film. So, don't knock on it, it'll crumble to pieces. The "cabin fever" the father-Jack character goes through would seem to chip away at the nerve of his dislike for his wife and son. Slowly driving him to fits of rage and acts of violence, the movie begins to spend less time making the hotel creepy and more time on making Jack creepy. The effectiveness of this rests entirely on the actor Jack Nicholson's ability to play down the crude transition from sane to insane, to maximize the coldness a person needs to kill others. Instead, Jack plays up the mannerisms Kubrick assumes to associate with crazy people. So, the Overlook Hotel sort of becomes a madhouse-of-one. Every time I watch the film now, I can't help but shake my head in pity at how ridiculous and silly (the bad kind of silly, not the amusing kind) Nicholson comes off. I feel absolutely no threat emanating from his character. He almost exists in this mode for actors to study how to act...forgive me for being so blunt, but: retarded. Jack may show the strain of a weak person letting themselves go crazy, but there really are different kinds of crazy. There's a scary kind. And then there's just an annoying kind. Jack's the latter, not the former. Sitting and watching the film, I can help but feel the audience is being expected to babysit Jack, rather than him being the evil, frightening authority figure a murderous father is supposed to be.
But the film is more successful than not, in spite of these blaring flaws. The music score for the film is incredibly potent and strong, and if not creepy, than at least brooding and cool. There's a lot of very good imagery and camera-work. The character of Danny, as well as the actor playing him, are not very interesting. But Shelley Duvall playing the mother, Wendy, gives an amazing performance. I'm told many audiences dislike a woman in distress, but she is the key to anything from this film being mistaken for tension. Because she takes everything very hard. She's an emotional wreck, and a very sensitive person. And Duvall as an actress hangs everything she's thinking and feeling right out on her wonderful face. That's a character-actor's face. And a believable character, too. As much as she is a victim and even men seem to respond to a strong female protagonist, she's an effective element in the film at making you believe things aren't right. More than what you see floating on the surface. She's especially worn toward the end of the film, when Jack begins stalking her. Her eyes just light up with a fever-pitch of fear and terror. Without her, there is no true "horror" to this film.