1890 horror, dir. Stanley Kubrick, Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall:
IMDb. Months isolated in an
otherwise empty hotel, that doesn't sound stressful at all.
And the first thing I find myself wondering here is: was I ever
supposed to like Nicholson's characters? Definitely not in One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest, maybe a bit in Chinatown, certainly not in
the later Batman or The Witches of Eastwick. Here I get the
impression that I was genuinely supposed to start with "the guy is
suffering" and only gradually pivot to "it's too late for him". But at
least in the film portrayal Jack is never a good guy even before he
comes under supernatural temptation. And every single time he is
tested in any way, supernatural or not, he fails. He can't say one
sentence without trying to score points off his wife or child.
And that makes the story boring. Good guy is tempted and falls (and
maybe redeems himself): that's a story. Bad guy tries to get better,
maybe succeeds and maybe fails: that's a story too. Bad guy is tempted
and becomes a worse guy? Why do I want to watch him?
I wonder why the character is even married. There's no sign of
affection even when he's in a positive mood. My assumption based on
what we see here would have to be "got her pregnant and was forced
to".
Kubrick puts a lot on the son, played by Danny Lloyd, and he really
can't carry it. Not surprising, very few child actors could. But
combined with Nicholson's standard unpleasant performance it doesn't
leave much to enjoy.
A friend has recently blogged about isolation and
horror:
to over-summarise, if you have a friend with you the horror is less
horrifying as you can sleep in shifts, you can agree that you did
indeed both just see that, and so on. This film does a decent job of
countering that: from Wendy's point of view, Danny is a kid who can
need protection but basically not understand stuff or be an ally, Jack
is at best unhelpful and at worst an agent of the problem—so she is
isolated even as she's sharing quarters with people who are nominally
her friends. (And Duvall, who came to fame with this role, plays the
sort of slightly flaky nonentity she'd often be called to reprise,
forced by Kubrick to be nothing more than isolated and weepy for the
majority of her screen time.)
Something that doesn't work as well now: everyone has done creepy
twin girls. It was probably more impressive in 1980.
Kubrick loves his long tracking shots of course (and Steadicam was new
and shiny in 1980), but he doesn't have the guts to film in a real
location rather than on a set—so it all ends up feeling synthetic, and
there's never a sense of how far set piece A is from set piece B.
(Very few filmmakers do this; Alien was nearly unique in building
the full spaceship interior with its connections, even if it wasn't
all filmable, so that going from A to B between shots would feel to
the cast like going from A to B.).
When Wendy accuses Jack of having hurt Danny (even if in the European
cut we don't already know that he's done it before) his betrayal is
one of the clearest demonstrations that he's not a good guy: this is
the sort of thing he would plausibly do (and, we may or may not know,
has done), so he shouldn't be surprised that the most obvious
explanation is that he's done it (again). Wendy has no reason to
assume that Jack has been influenced by The Evil; it's just the sort
of guy he is.
I haven't read the book, but in the film Hallorann the Other Psychic
Person comes all the way back just to be killed. (And the sting is
ripped straight out of Bernard Herrman's Psycho score.) So he's both
Magical Negro and First to Die! Yay. (But he does provide the other
Snow-Trac for the ending.)
In the end I felt that this film was so busy being pretentious it
forgot to be scary. I like 2001: A Space Odyssey and I can at least
enjoy the technical elements of A Clockwork Orange, but I can't see
myself voluntarily returning to this.