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| Shining, The |
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  (8/10)
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Runtime: 119/ |
| Public Rating: 9.30 (46 votes) |
Director: Stanley Kubrick |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Horror |
Year: 1980 |
| Writer(s): Diane Johnson and Stanley Kubrick |
| Reviewed by: Goatdog |
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This masterful adaptation of Steven King's famous novel is among Kubrick's best. He took the best-selling book and made it a beautiful thing, equal parts King and Kubrick. The essentials of the plot are still there, but he brought his own sense of suspense and irony, claustrophobia and absurdity. I know purists dislike the film, thinking that it is essentially a dumbed-down version of the book, but they are missing the point. A literary source has elements that will not work visually. They only work in the imagination of the reader. Kubrick distilled that sense of doom that King fostered in his novel into tangible, visual elements. With Jack Nicholson bringing the Jack Torrance character to vivid and terrifying life in one of his best performances, this film is among that rare class of adaptations: it is better than the source material, although rabid fans of the King novel would probably disagree.
Jack Nicholson plays Jack Torrance, an out-of-work teacher who takes a job as a caretaker at the Overlook Hotel for the winter. He is attempting to write a book, and he thinks the solitude will help him. He is also running from his ghosts: alcoholism, child abuse, and the real reason he's out of work. Shelly Duvall plays Wendy, his wife, who really loves him, but fears him an equal amount. Danny Lloyd plays Danny, their son, who is a curious kid who also loves and fears his father. He has visions, brought to him by his invisible friend Tony, where he can somewhat see the future, and the future at the Overlook looks bad (the way they have Tony speak to Danny, with him moving his index finger like a puppet, is the only gripe I have about the film).
The Overlook is both Jack's savior and his downfall. The seemingly limitless space of the maze of hotel corridors, as well as the actual maze of trees on the grounds, slowly begin to close in as he is unable to write, the fears of his failure as an artist and as a father weighing him down until his tenuous hold on sanity slips.
Kubrick has created a beautifully sinister place where time doesn't really exist; it is fluid, bringing events of the past and of the future together effortlessly. As Jack grows desperate, he turns to the space inside his head for safety. He meets a bartender, who isn't really there but is terribly real, who fuels his ego while feeding his thirst for booze. He meets the former caretaker, who stealthily convinces him that his real place is with the Overlook, forever. To Jack, facing the prospect of spending the rest of the winter without writing, this newfound power looks like a good idea.
Meanwhile, Danny's gift has opened some real and some figurative doors in the hotel. He sees the daughters of the former caretaker, who were murdered by their insane father when he couldn't take the horror of living in the hotel anymore. He sees the rotting ghost in room 213, the one room in the hotel where he was ordered not to go. And most disturbingly, he sees a recurring vision of the ornate lobby of the hotel, its doors swinging open under a deluge of blood. Whether this is a vision of the past or of the future is inconsequential; since time doesn't really exist in the Overlook, it is both. This film is one of the most effective horror films ever made.
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