An OK film but a poor horror movie with awful acting

Rating: 6/10 (12 August 2006)

After "A Clockwork Orange" things did not go so well for the great Stanley Kubrick. He was blamed for violence allegedly incited by "A Clockwork Orange" so he had the film pulled in England. His pet "Napoleon" project got canned after much effort in pre-production, which prompted him to make "Barry Lyndon" as a consolation substitute. After many arduous and expensive months of location filming, "Barry Lyndon" flopped both critically (not unusual) and commercially (which was unusual for Kubrick). Kubrick badly needed a low-risk hit movie, particularly in America, to raise his stocks again with Hollywood. "The Shining" was that movie, and was indeed a hit in America.
The trivia section mentions that Stephen King was surprised that Kubrick was sold on the first chapter of the novel, since the first chapter was atypical of the rest of the novel. It certainly contained no real scares. However when you consider the above background, you can sort of understand the novel's appeal to Kubrick as a film adaptation. The first chapter describes in great detail the layout of the hotel, in which almost the entire snowbound story takes place, as well as the seething writer's anger at being questioned about his struggle with alcohol and his personal failures (poignant for Kubrick?). Here was a film which could be shot entirely in the studio (low risk, low cost) using a small, relatively inexpensive cast featuring a well-known star (Nicholson) with whom Kubrick had wanted to work for some time. This allowed Kubrick unprecedented and relatively inexpensive scope for his notoriously excessive re-shoots. It was also based on a best-selling book, thus drawing in the numerous Stephen King fans. The hotel's long empty passageways also gave plenty of scope for Kubrick's trademark tracking/zoom shots down the length of long symmetrical corridors, while Jack Torrance's mental disintegration allows Kubrick to use his other trademark, The Glare.
As a gadget freak, Kubrick generally had a technical innovation in almost every movie. In this case it was the Steadicam, to which he had been introduced several years earlier. The stairwells and carpeted corridors provided a perfect opportunity to use the Steadicam on previously "impossible" shots, and some shots (e.g. the Big Wheel ride over the carpets, or the staircase ascent preceding the Dog Man) seem to have been included purely to show off the capabilities of his new gadget.
Yet in focusing on the technical appeal of this project, Kubrick lost sight of one important thing - he has no understanding of the horror genre, and thus doesn't have a clue as to how to make a scary film. Though the film is reasonably interesting and absorbing, there are only a couple of even moderately scary scenes in the whole film. Nicholson's acting throughout is outrageously hammy, Shelley Duvall is monochromatically hysterical and tearful for too much of the movie, while the child actor does as well as you can expect a 5 year old to do, which isn't very well at all. Kubrick apologists try to claim he wasn't trying to make a scary film, that he was actually commenting on the role of television, or the plight of the Indians (or some other barrow the apologist is pushing) in the guise of a horror movie. However when Diane Johnson was given the job of co-writing the screenplay, Kubrick told her to make it "completely scary". So they failed to achieve their goals.
The film is justly famous for the ambiguity of its plot. At first Kubrick repeatedly implies that the ghosts are merely imagined for most of the movie, then only towards the end suggests they are capable of action in the physical realm. While this gets the audience discussing the movie, it is also blatantly inconsistent. Likewise with the film's punchline suggesting Charles Grady, Delbert Grady and Jack Torrance may or may not have previously been there and may or may not have been the same person. There is a point beyond which the shifting of perspective turns from tantalising ambiguity and fascinating puzzle into annoying and unsatisfying confusion. Kubrick's extra edits for the 2 hour version seem to remove a great deal of clarifying information, and accentuate this confusion further. I don't know if this was dome out of incompetence or a love of confusion. Either way it's not impressive.
In short, this is an unsuccessful Kubrick film, but nevertheless a moderately entertaining one.