STANLEY KUBRICK
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva STANLEY KUBRICK 1928-99 Ibet Stanley Kubrick never had a nightmare while shooting a movie. Oh, I'm sure he had budgetary and logistic nightmares as any filmmaker must,...
...The ghosts of The Shining turn Jack Nicholson into a maniac so he will kill at their bidding...
...The effect of spontaneity is wonderful in art, whether it's in a Chekhov story or a Rogers and Hart song or a Robert Airman movie...
...Defeated, Humbert finds himself still in love with Lolita, even though she's no longer a little girl...
...Martin Scorsese does, but he alternates deeply felt work with strictly commercial ventures...
...Similarly, when Humbert Humbert, though quite poignantly played by James Mason, is tormented by his rival, Clare Quilty, the audience laughs in support of Quilty, not just because of Peter Sellers's hip performance but because Quilty is the undoer of schemes, the thwarter of domestic and sexual tyranny...
...Not many American filmmakers, living or dead, prompt this sort of speculation...
...Kubrick's protagonists are all either control freaks or their victims, and the victims don't put up with much for long...
...Kubrick once said that this film "finally postulates what is little less than a scientific definition of God...
...This pity costs Barry his leg, but the audience recognizes that Barry has become a better man...
...Killer's Kiss (1955): gangster noir...
...Barry Lyndon manipulates the greed and vanity of English aristocrats to engineer his social climb...
...Still, I'm not surprised that a director as daring as Kubrick finally felt challenged to enter a realm where control cannot even be attempted, much less accomplished: the world of sexual dreams in Arthur Schnitzler's novella, Dream Story, which Kubrick filmed as Eyes Wide Shut, to be released next summer...
...Most popular American directors—even the best of them, like Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielbergtap into our dreams, nightmares, and fetishes, not their own...
...It turned out to be his last effort...
...Not that the characters are ever as passive as flowers...
...Commonweal 10 April 23,1999...
...What was it about Kubrick's art that took him away from the natural world...
...A great public monument to be sure, but the difference between it and Malick's Tlie Thin Red Line is the difference between nearly flawless rhetoric and flawed but memorable poetry...
...The cinematography is unmistakably Kubrickian (and remained so in all the firms to come, no matter what cameraman he used...
...And then the machinery breaks down...
...To do what he wanted to do, he had to reject the outdoor world of natural light, shifting clouds, wind on water, and never-quite-controllable crowds...
...How could he...
...Barry Lyndon loses his bid to rise in society because of the interference of his stepson, whom Lyndon then has a chance to kill in a duel...
...Though I don't envy the nights Kubrick may have had once each movie opened and he lapsed into those periods (growing longer as he got older) when he toyed with projects before committing his energies to them...
...Fear and Desire (1953) and Paths of Glory (1957): antiwar war movies...
...I think the word "scientific" is hubristic in regard to a movie or any work of art, but Kubrick and his scriptwriter, Arthur C. Clarke, do present God as the ultimate scientist constantly refining his laboratory creation, the human race...
...2001: A Space Odyssey is Kubrick's ultimate portrayal of the consequences of manipulation, yet also an exception to the rest of his work...
...I look forward to losing sleep over it...
...And when those bombs drop at the end of Dr...
...Strangelove and his Russian counterparts create bombs and counterbombs to control the course of the cold war...
...Life cannot abide being turned into machinery...
...But the death of his little boy in a riding accident has taught Lyndon pity and he's unable to pull the trigger at the duel's crucial moment...
...Oh, I'm sure he had budgetary and logistic nightmares as any filmmaker must, but no oneiric, forehead-dampening visitations...
...The breakdown plunges the manipulator into nightmare, but for Kubrick and the audience, it is a release from the nightmare of manipulation...
...Humbert Humbert schemes not only to seduce Lolita but to calibrate every minute of her day so she won't have a life apart from his...
...I yield to none in my admiration of Saving Private Ryan, but, though its technique has the unmistakable Spielberg touch, the result is the cinematic equivalent of a public monument...
...What a relief...
...It is the world as hothouse with the humans as carefully cultivated plants...
...In short, he rejected the possibilities of incorporating accidents into rehearsed drama, the sort of thing Robert Altman and Bernardo Bertolucci thrive on...
...Is Kubrick trying to replace nature with his own version of nature...
...His early work was thoroughly popular, even pulpy stuff to which, like Spielberg, he gave a personal flavor...
...Woody Allen, after all, creates his personal vision of New York City while shooting in the real streets and terraces of that city...
...The Killing (1956): big heist melodrama, similar to The AspMt jungle...
...Obviously, this is the one act of manipulation we must root for...
...But also wonderful, though less immediately ingratiating, are the pleasures of multilayered artifice in a Shakespeare sonnet or a Nabokov novel or a Stanley Kubrick movie...
...Since capital punishment is a recurrent hot topic in our culture, Eastwood must come round to making a movie about it, as he has just done with True Crime...
...After Spartacus (I960), Stanley Kubrick confined himself to poetry...
...I've seen the film in theaters as well as on video...
...Sometimes the void left by the destruction of schemes is filled by a quality not usually considered a Kubrickian characteristic but present in most of his movies: compassion...
...The boot camp of Full Metal jacket changes boys into supposedly disciplined killers...
...Spartacus (1960): sword-and-sandals, but livelier than Ben-Hur...
...I'm looking at some stills from Lolita, not publicity shots snapped on the set between takes but actual freeze-frames...
...An experiment in horticulture seems to be taking place...
...The darker tones are velvety, but the objects and actors are often seen in a soft, hazy, humid light...
...That he turns out to be a manipulator himself lays on the irony...
...In a Kubrick film, a manipulator turns some sector of Commonweal 19 April 23, 1999 life into machinery, and into this machinery he inserts the people who serve his fantasies or his drive for power...
...Strangelove to the tune of "We'll Meet Again," the audience again laughs...
...Terrence Malick does, but he makes only one movie a decade...
...This is the way the world would look if the entire planet were under glass...
...Sterling Hayden, the chief schemer of The Killing, is as sympathetic as master criminals get, but when the suitcase containing the booty from his heist bursts open in the airport and $2 million in bills fly about in the tail wind of taxiing planes, the audience doesn't groan in sympathy for the likable Hayden but explodes into laughter...
...After Spartacus, are there any real crowds in a Kubrick film...
...Here, mankind's lust for mastery leads to the exploration of the solar system, but exploration takes the astronaut hero to the point where he—and mankind in general—are helpless, and God must take over to launch mankind into its next stage...
...His love has survived his perversion and, rather than take revenge on her for her escape from him, he ensures her future happiness...
...Kubrick was often accused of being a control freak himself, laboring over his movies for years only to produce unspontaneous, airless results...
...All those missile-defense programs, all that "thinking about the unthinkable," all those stratagems and counterstrategems—gone at one stroke as the world blows up...
...I myself thought this of Barry Lyndon at first look, but subsequent viewings have disclosed both the film's sardonic wit and, in the final reels, its barely murmured compassion...
...While leafing through scripts, plot outlines, and optioned novels, was the man waiting for a demon to straddle him and let him know that it was time to get back to work...
...Then Kubrick moved to England and began making his projects in studio sound stages that allowed him stricter control than he'd ever enjoyed before...
...Surely the process of putting his most disturbing thoughts and visions on celluloid must have cleared his mind...
...This laughter is the revenge of the life force against one who programs life to do his bidding...
...The mastermind criminal of The Killing has his underlings obey his timetable to the second during a racetrack heist...
...That his films were now more personally conceived doesn't explain this shift...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 8
