THE SHINING (1980)
"Places are like people: some shine and some don't."
4 out of ****
Starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Kubrick and Diane Johnson, from the novel by Stephen King
Cinematography by John Alcott
There is only one character in Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING, and it is not a person. It is the Overlook Hotel, a remote Colorado resort that closes during the winter, because no one can reach it through the snowbound mountains. During this season, it is empty, save for the caretaker and his family. An empty hotel is an eerie place; without the bustle of guests and bellhops and receptionists, it becomes a still, silent place. Too still, too silent. It is a place where something is waiting to happen--and if it doesn't happen, the hotel will drag ghosts out of the past to make it happen.
Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is the caretaker this particular winter, with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) joining him. Jack claims to be a writer, and looks forward to the solitude which will give him a chance to work on a new project. He isn't concerned that a previous caretaker, presumed to be suffering an extreme case of cabin fever, killed his wife and twin daughters, then took his own life. We know better.
Based on what we see of him, Jack can't be a very good writer; he possesses no wit, no charm, no originality. He is a void waiting for a personality to fill him. Eventually, it does--giving Nicholson the opportunity to perform some of his most famous scenes, and he performs them gleefully. He takes the menace and madness that lurk in the corners of the Overlook and embodies them in one man; it is a great performance, just as the Overlook is a triumph of production design.
Nicholson manages to take something trite and boring and make it skewed and unnerving--and this is what the film as a whole does. Stephen King famously criticized Kubrick's adaptation of his novel, but Kubrick at least did justice to one of King's strengths as a writer: his ability to take the mundane, the trivial, and make it a locus of terror. The dialogue and the people in THE SHINING are terribly banal. Remove the style, and all the interactions--a job interview, a father-son conversation, a tour of the hotel, etc.--would be stupefingly dull and clichéd.
But the film is never boring; it is compelling and disturbing. Kubrick uses formal, strikingly symmetrical visual compositions for even the most routine actions and conversations, and he also avoids close-ups as much as possible, so that what we see, we see from a distance, and what we see are everyday actions presented in an artificial, stylized manner. This incongruity generates a sense of unease, an unease which pervades every shot. We know something will go horribly wrong; it's just a matter of when and how.
The genius of the film is in the details. It is in the way Kubrick shows Danny riding around the hotel hallways on his go-cart, shooting from a low angle so that the large, silent passages seem even larger, even more silent, and very ominous, as they loom high over Danny's head. It is in the way he has Danny--using the unnatural voice of Tony, the "friend" who lives in his mouth--say "red rum" over and over again, the pitch rising at a key dramatic moment. It is in the way we are shown a brief glimpse through a bedroom door, late in the film, of two mysterious characters, hinting at further secrets somewhere in the hotel's dark history.
There is never a moment when Kubrick--with help from cinematographer John Alcott, production designer Roy Walker, and a seriously unsettling score--does not seem to be utterly sure of himself. The movie is a showcase for his talent; I am reluctant to attach any deeper significance, because none is needed. Yes, Jack is a recovering alcholic; yes, there are intimations of abuse and dysfunction; yes, the movie insinuates that on a deeper level, it may be "about" those issues--but, fundamentally, I think to look for those meanings misses the point.
THE SHINING wants to frighten us, to induce a pleasurable frisson of terror, and to impress us with its craftsmanship. If it's "about" anything, it's about cameras moving slowly and sinisterly down empty hallways; abrupt images of silent, solemn twin girls; a frantic chase through a snow-covered hedge maze. It's about style, and it knows that subject as well as any movie ever made.
A Review by David Dalgleish (May 7/98)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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