There's an eerie commercial for Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (still
a couple of weeks from release as I write) that's been running on TV as of
late: images of Tom Cruise and a visibly preoccupied Nicole Kidman about to
have sex, their arrival at some kind of pagan costume ball intercut, a rolling
blues (Chris Isaak?) about having done a "bad, bad thing" overtop. It's the
best thing I've seen all year, leaving me as anxious as everyone else to see
the final film of a director I've always regarded with ambivalence. If EYES
WIDE SHUT turns out to be as provocative as its trailer, for me Kubrick's
filmography will finish with a symmetry that runs counter to most people's
estimation of him: his greatest work at the beginning and end of his career,
with the middle--the films for which he was all but elevated to sainthood--
given over to the obscure, arid fantasies of an imperious technocrat. Here's
hoping.
THE KILLING (1956): An obvious forerunner of RESERVOIR DOGS with its jumbled
narrative and disparate gallery of petty criminals, brought together by
Sterling Hayden to rob a racetrack during a big stakes race. Hayden is always
great--Nick Nolte at his most bearish is the closest parallel today--and here
he's matched by one of Elisha Cook Jr.'s withering patsies, Marie Windsor as
the wife who messes with Cook's mind, and Tim Carey doing what must be some
kind of bizarre Kirk Douglas parody. True to Kubrick's subsequent career path,
the robbery is a success and everyone goes home rich....not quite: Hayden's
"What's the difference?" is maybe the grimmest closing line ever.
PATHS OF GLORY (1957): My favourite Kubrick film, my favourite Kirk Douglas
film, my favourite war film. It's short (86 minutes), without cliche (except
for an ironic but nonetheless awkward singalong at the end), and almost
mathematical in the way it depicts bureaucracy closing in on three hapless
soldiers who are handpicked to take the fall for a hopeless WWI military
maneuver. The choreography of the Attack on Ant Hill is brutal but economical,
highlighted by a series of claustrophobic tracking shots through the trenches,
and the trial that follows is marked by a carefully reasoned illogic that
anticipates CATCH-22. As one of the accused soldiers, Tim Carey turns his
closed-mouth seething from THE KILLING upside down and comes out even weirder:
he always seems ready to fall asleep mid-sentence.
SPARTACUS (1960): I saw this in a swank Toronto theatre when it was rereleased
to great fanfare a few years ago: orchestral overture, intermission, restored
"Super Technirama 70" print, and the return of Laurence Olivier's infamous
oysters-and-snails seduction of Tony Curtis. I've seen similar presentations
of GONE WITH THE WIND, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, VERTIGO, and A STAR IS BORN over
the years, and SPARTACUS was the one that most lived up to the promise of such
projects--three hours-plus of lively, voluptuous biblical spectacle in which
to lose yourself. Peter Ustinov's bumbling obsequiousness is hilarious, but
my favourite performance is given by Nick Dennis, who gets to shout about
nine words in various crowd scenes. Dennis was a cousin of my dad's who also
had speaking parts in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE and KISS ME DEADLY; I'm only
three degrees of separation from Kubrick.
LOLITA (1962): James Mason has Humbert Humbert down cold: with only a minimum
of interior voiceover to work with (thankfully), he conveys the intricacies
of Humbert's criminal obsession through his eyes, an impatient stammer, and
his special brand of urbane weaseliness. Shelly Winters and Sue Lyons are
almost as good, while Peter Sellers is all over the place--I like his Clare
Quilty best when he's dancing near the beginning. The languid pacing and
cinematography are excellent. Everything's in place, except what can't be
translated. Nabakov's Humbert, observing a kindred spirit: "There he was
devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a
glum repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of
life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language--there he was in priggish
New England, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young--oh, having a
grand time and fooling everybody; and here was I."
DR. STRANGELOVE (1964): Every few years that I go back to this, I'm more and
more able to get into the spirit of it. It's schizophrenic enough (sometimes
deadpan, sometimes wildly over-the-top) that it might throw you the first
time, but recently I found myself laughing out loud at things like the look
on George C. Scott's face after he's dressed down by Peter Sellers' President
Muffley, or the way that Keenan Wynn vigilantly watches out for the interests
of Coca-Cola Ltd. The Beatles were a more brazen release from the Cold War
tensions of 1964, but you can see where DR. STRANGELOVE's talk of "deviated
preverts" and "precious bodily fluids" helped shape the rest of the decade.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968): Voted the 10th-greatest film ever made in SIGHT
AND SOUND's most recent historical poll (1992), with Kubrick's death probably
ensuring it will rank even higher next time around. I've given it my best shot
three or four times now, but I still feel much like James Mason in LOLITA:
given the choice between another go at 2001 or the opportunity to look after
a toothache, I'd rather nurse the tooth.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971): I saw this years ago and didn't care for it, so
I rented it out for this piece and had the same reaction. Screen violence
was a huge topic of conversation among film critics in the early '70s (the
conversation still goes on, but it's been moved into the arena of presidential
campaigns), as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, STRAW DOGS, DIRTY HARRY, and a litany of
key titles were passionately championed or attacked by John Simon, Pauline
Kael, and other critics of the day. I'm not sure what Kubrick is trying to
say about violence here: if a film doesn't reach me in ways that register
deeper than whatever message it might have--I'm definitely at the passive,
against-interpretation end of the spectrum as a viewer--I'm too lazy to do
the necessary thinking to figure things out. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE doesn't. It
does seem as if all the thought and creativity went into the set and costume
design. For a truly sobering adaptation of a famous dystopian novel, I much
prefer Michael Radford's version of 1984.
BARRY LYNDON (1975): One of three Kubrick films I haven't seen--the others,
1953's FEAR AND DESIRE and 1955's KILLER'S KISS, are hardly (if at all) ever
screened. I take it that watching BARRY LYNDON on video would be beside the
point, so I'll hold off until it turns up at a local rep theatre.
THE SHINING (1980): Some people place this on the short-list of greatest
horror films ever made, others think it barely deserves to be called a horror
film. Stephen King, who thought so highly of it he felt compelled to direct
a TV remake himself in 1997, once traced the film's fatal weakness to a late-
night phone call during production wherein Kubrick confessed his atheism and
then hung up; to render evil convincingly, reasoned King, you have to begin
with a belief in God. Myself, I think it's garbled, overlong, a work of some
condescension ("I'm here to prove that the genre can be elevated to the level
of art"), and scary, most memorably in the Steadicam shots of Danny Lloyd
careening through the halls of the Overlook on his bike. I still look warily
down the corridor outside my parents' apartment for fear of encountering
those Diane Arbus twins.
FULL METAL JACKET (1987): Bad timing (which will happen when you take two
or three presidential administrations between films) saw Kubrick's Viet Nam
movie appear in the midst of PLATOON, CASUALTIES OF WAR, BORN ON THE FOURTH
OF JULY, and a half-dozen others. Oliver Stone's films were bigger with
audiences and CASUALTIES a better film, so FULL METAL JACKET came and went
fairly quietly. The first third, where Lee Ermey's tightly-wound drill
instructor zeroes in on Vincent D'Onofrio as his personal hand-puppet, is
as pure as PATHS OF GLORY, the balance a sometimes ponderous assemblage of
moments. Good soundtrack, highlighted by "Surfin' Bird" and "These Boots Are
Made for Walkin'." Actually, Kubrick was two-for-two in the '80s when it came
to inspiring pop music himself: THE SHINING was commemorated on a Husker Du
B-side, "All Work and No Play," and FULL METAL JACKET provided 2 Live Crew
with the sample for "Me So Horny." Maybe Britney Spears or Ricky Martin will
come away from EYES WIDE SHUT with something.
[I wrote the above a couple of months ago for a friend in New Zealand. I've
seen EYES WIDE SHUT by now, but I'll leave what I wrote as is. I'm in-
between on EWS, leaning toward the side of the more negative reviews that
have appeared. I don't have anything really new or interesting to add to all
that's been written already; good places to start are reviews by Stanley
Kauffmann, Charles Taylor, and Andrew Sarris, and a series of shorter
pieces by Greil Marcus and some other people in SALON.]