A.I.,the Aryan Papers,and Eyes Wide Shut all present characters who are locked into their roles and cannot be authentic: the robot boy who yearns to be accepted as real, the Jewish child forced to masquerade as a gentile, and the man Bill Harford who cannot quite dare to break through from dreaming about a sexual adventure to actually having one. Like Barry Lyndon, Bill remains on the outside looking in even when he’s at the center of the action.
Shelley Duvall, the much-loved US character actor and star of films such as The Shining, Annie Hall and Popeye, has died four days after her 75th birthday.
“It’s not just owning something that makes money,” Duvall said of her financial missteps in Hollywood. “You have to also control it. You have to make sure it’s a good deal.” PHOTOGRAPHED BY ERIC RYAN ANDERSON
Searching for Shelley Duvall: The Reclusive Icon on Fleeing Hollywood and the Scars of Making ‘The Shining’
After leaving L.A., and making only one public appearance since, on a widely condemned mental illness episode of 'Dr. Phil,' the complicated actress sat down for a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter about her legacy and the trauma of the Stanley Kubrick film.
BY SETH ABRAMOVITCH
11 February 2021
Out on the tranquil banks of a river in Texas Hill Country, Shelley Duvall pulls up in a white Toyota 4Runner. Her favorite place to sit is in the driver’s seat. It’s also the only place to sit: The rest of the car is filled from floor to roof with a crush of acquisitions, including a bucket of plastic silverware, a jar of Green Giant sliced mushrooms and a bouquet of silk roses. Duvall, 71, passes entire days in her car, chatting with locals and snacking on takeout food. She shares a home in the area with Dan Gilroy, 76, a member of the early Madonna band Breakfast Club. Gilroy was briefly romantically linked to the singer but has been with Duvall since 1989, the two having fallen in love while co-starring in the Disney Channel movie Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme. Produced by Duvall, it featured an all-star cast (including Duvall’s former boyfriend Paul Simon) and has become an abiding cultural touchstone among millennials.
A candid conversation with the pioneering creator of2001: A Space Odyssey,Dr. StrangeloveandLolita
Throughout his 17-year career as a moviemaker, Stanley Kubrick has committed himself to pushing the frontiers of film into new and often controversial regions—despite the box-office problems and censorship battles that such a commitment invariably entails. Never a follower of the safe, well-traveled road to Hollywood success, he has consistently struck out on his own, shattering movie conventions and shibboleths along the way. In many respects, his latest film, the epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, stands as a metaphor for Kubrick himself. A technically flawless production that took three years and $10,500,000 to create, 2001 could have been just a super-spectacle of exotic gadgetry and lavish special effects; but with the collaboration of Arthur C. Clarke, astrophysicist and doyen of science-fiction writers, Kubrick has elevated a sci-fi adventure to the level of allegory—creating a stunning and disturbing metaphysical speculation on man’s destiny that has fomented a good-sized critical controversy and become a cocktail-party topic across the country. An uncompromising film, 2001 places a heavy intellectual burden upon the audience, compelling each viewer to unravel for himself its deeper meaning and significance. Its message is conveyed not through plot or standard expository dialog but through metaphysical hints and visual symbols that demand confrontation and interpretation.
I think Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is some sort of great film, and an unforgettable endeavor. Technically and imaginatively, what he put into it is staggering: five years of his life; his novel and screenplay, with Arthur C. Clarke; his production, his direction, his special effects; his humor and stamina and particular disquiet. The film is not only hideously funny — like Dr. Strangelove — about human speech and response at a point where they have begun to seem computerized, and where more and more people sound like recordings left on while the soul is out. It is also a uniquely poetic piece of sci-fi, made by a man who truly possesses the drives of both science and fiction.
Barry Lyndon • Piano Trio in E Flat • Franz Schubert
BARRY LYNDON: KUBRICK’S GRANDEST GAMBLE
by Richard Schickel
FIRST PARADOX: Barry Lyndon, a story of an 18th century Irish gentleman-rogue, is the first novel of a great 19th century writer, William Makepeace Thackeray. It shows early signs of a genius that would nourish only after creative struggle and personal adversity. In time, this forgotten book becomes the basis for the tenth feature film by a well-established, well-rewarded 20th century artist—Director Stanley Kubrick. In it, he demonstrates the qualities that eluded Thackeray: singularity of vision, mature mastery of his medium, near-reckless courage in asserting through this work a claim not just to the distinction critics have already granted him but to greatness that time alone can — and probably will — confirm.
Is it possible? Can it be? Could one reasonably, soberly, in full command of one’s critical faculties, in full knowledge of one’s critical responsibilities when confronting a major portion of a major artist’s work, advance the possibility that from such a commonplace, there arose this uncommon sublimity—Dr. Strangelove, 2001. A Space Odyssey, —Stanley Kubrick’s marvelously varied, wonderfully ingenious, curiously gnomic contemplations of where we have arrived in the history of the race and where we might yet be going?
Hollywood — After a 7-year silence and amidst the usual atmosphere of secrecy, speculation and high expectations, Stanley Kubrick has delivered Full Metal Jacket an intense, schematic, superbly made Vietnam War drama that will impress some and confound others.
Director Benjamin Ross, whose debut feature is The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, celebrates the drama of failure in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon
by Benjamin Ross
I saw Barry Lyndon at the time of its first release and despite seeing it only once until a few years ago, it resonated as strongly throughout my adolescence as any other film. For all of its intricately detailed artifice, the film struck right at the heart of my childhood and family experience in the most direct and emotional way. Films rejected on first release often prove the most interesting and timeless. Consider from this period Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Night Moves or, from a decade later, The King of Comedy or The Right Stuff, all films best described as equivocal and ambivalent. They belong to a mini-tradition of powerfully intelligent, mainstream pictures which became marginalised due to commercial failure or a temporary lack of comprehension on the part of studio, critics or public. Other than that, the common ground between them is that each in some way involves its protagonists in a struggle with a culturally inscribed heroic ideal, and each is unable to resolve that relationship except through failure. Given the direction of our popular culture it’s a fair bet that’s the reason people stayed away from them.
In 1962, the catholic legion of decency was bound to condemn Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the story of a middle-aged pedophile who marries a widow, loses her, and then becomes the lover of his adolescent stepdaughter. Thirty-six years later, Adrian Lyne’s 1998 remake confronted a number of the same problems that Kubrick faced in terms of adaptation, censorship, and distribution. The two film adaptations of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita do not exactly follow the old sexist adage about women—the beautiful ones aren’t faithful and the faithful ones aren’t beautiful. In fact, Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film was neither particularly beautiful nor faithful, at least in superficial terms. Robert Stam has questioned the legitimacy of the entire concept, arguing that “we need to be less concerned with inchoate notions of ‘fidelity’ and to give more attention to dialogical responses—to readings, critiques, interpretations, and rewritings of prior material.”1 When Kubrick released Lolita, the film’s audiences, critics, and would-be censors could not agree on how true to the novel Kubrick’s version was, but fidelity was not the most pressing issue at the time. Kinky sex was the sticking point for many readers and viewers, and although some “felt cheated that the erotic weight wasn’t in the story,” Production Code arbiters objected to its supposed tawdriness.2
Sue Lyon, Who Played Lolita in Kubrick Film at 14, Dies at Age 73
By Associated Press December 30, 2019
(NEW YORK) — Sue Lyon, who at age 14 played the title character in director Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film “Lolita,” has died.
Lyon’s longtime friend Phil Syracopoulos told The New York Times she had been in declining health for some time, and died Thursday in Los Angeles. No further details on her death were provided. She was 73.
Sue Lyon
Lyon was reportedly chosen from some 800 girls who sought the role of “Lolita” for the film based on Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel about a middle-aged literature professor’s sexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl.
Nabokov also wrote the screenplay for Kubrick’s adaptation, whose cast included movie luminaries James Mason, Peter Sellers and Shelley Winters.
Sue Lyon
A close-up of her face wearing heart-shaped sunglasses with a lollipop at her lips was used as the movie’s poster and became its lasting iconic image, despite neither the glasses nor the sucker appearing in the film, which eliminated the book’s more graphic sexual depictions and played up its comic aspects. For Lyon, it was her first film. She had taken a pair of tiny TV roles before it, and would act for nearly 20 years after it, but would never be known for anything nearly as much as for “Lolita.”
Born the youngest of five children in Davenport, Iowa, in 1946, Lyon’s father died before she was one year old. Her mother soon after moved the family to Dallas, then a few years later took her children to Los Angeles, where Lyon took up acting.
Sue Lyon
She got roles in 1959 on “The Loretta Young Show,” where Kubrick noticed her, and in 1960 on “Dennis the Menace.”
Her post-“Lolita” credits included 1964’s “Night of the Iguana” and 1971’s “Tony Rome.” Her final acting job was in the 1980 horror film “Alligator.”
The best thing about Eyes Wide Shut may be its title, but anyone planning to see Stanley Kubrick’s long-awaited, posthumously released swan song is advised to go with their eyes open. Completed by Warner Bros. after the director’s death last March (and shamelessly proclaimed a “brilliant,” “haunting” “masterpiece” in the advance cover story provided by the studio’s corporate sibling, Time), this two hour and 39 minute gloss on Arthur Schnitzler’s fantasmagoric novella feels like a rough draft at best.
At worst, Eyes Wide Shut is ponderously (up)dated—as though Kubrick had finally gotten around to responding to Michelangelo Antonioni’s druggy Blow-Up—if not weirdly anachronistic. (It’s difficult to make a movie about a city you last set foot in 35 years ago.) Shot in London, Eyes Wide Shut opens in a fabulous Upper West Side apartment filled with florid paintings, Alice (Nicole Kidman) stripping down to dress up—and not for the last time. She and her doctor husband Bill (Tom Cruise) have been invited to the splendiferous Christmas bash hosted by a wealthy sleazebag of mystery (Sydney Pollack).
Writing about Eyes Wide Shut in Time, Richard Schickel had this to say about its source, Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 Traumnovelle: “Like a lot of the novels on which good movies are based, it is an entertaining, erotically charged fiction of the second rank, in need of the vivifying physicalization of the screen and the kind of narrative focus a good director can bring to imperfect but provocative life—especially when he has been thinking about it as long as Kubrick had”—i.e., at least since 1968, when he asked his wife to read it. This more or less matches the opinion of Frederic Raphael, Kubrick’s credited cowriter, as expressed in his recent memoir, Eyes Wide Open. But I would argue that Traumnovelle is a masterpiece worthy of resting alongside Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” Kafka’s The Trial, and Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. Like the Poe story, it features a phantasmal masked ball with dark and decadent undercurrents, and like the Kafka and Hedayat novels, it continually and ambiguously crosses back and forth between fantasy and waking reality. But it differs from all three in having a development that might be described as therapeutic—Schnitzler, a doctor, was a friend of Freud—making Eyes Wide Shut a rare departure for Kubrick and concluding his career with the closest thing in his work to a happy ending. Moreover, the question about the novella isn’t whether Kubrick has “brought it to life”—it lives vibrantly without him, even if he has brought it to a lot of people’s attention, including mine—but whether he’s done it justice, a problem also raised by his films of Lolita and A Clockwork Orange.
Eyes Wide Shut review – chilling secrecy, quaintly soft-porn sex
Stanley Kubrick’s last film, starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise as a warring, sexually obsessed couple, is fascinating and disquieting
Peter Bradshaw
Friday 29 November 2019
E
yes Wide Shut, now on rerelease, is fascinating, flawed late Stanley Kubrick, his final film before his death in 1999 at the age of 70. It was adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, or Dream Story, published in 1926 and originally set in Vienna. The film is a tale of sexual obsession among modern-day Manhattan’s wealthy and powerful classes and I originally valued it for its satirical potency, formal control and dreamlike self-possession, all of which are bound up in a certain kind of deadpan absurdity and soft-porn seriousness.
Tom Cruise plays Bill Harford, a well-off New York doctor with a fashionable clientele and a magnificent apartment in Central Park West, happily married to beautiful Alice (Nicole Kidman) a former art gallery director, now a stay-at-home mum to their young daughter. (In the book, they are Jewish, an important part of the doctor’s alienation. Not here.) Unsettled by each other’s flirtatious behaviour at a swell party given by a wealthy patient, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), and by a consumption of champagne and weed, they later have a furious row in which Alice defiantly confesses her lustful thoughts for a certain other man in her past, and Bill then finds himself on a nighttime odyssey, searching for extramarital adventure and gatecrashing a sinister masked orgy, to which he gains admittance by murmuring the (ironic) password “Fidelio”.
Ready for anything? Kidman and Cruise. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros
This revival comes with a brief documentary short about the film, Never Just a Dream, with interviewees including his longtime collaborator, executive producer and brother-in-law Jan Harlan — but not his widow Christiane, and not his most important collaborator, screenwriter Frederic Raphael. It might be time to reissue Raphael’s 1999 memoir of working with Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open, in which Raphael amusingly hints that the tense mood of Cruise’s cab ride out to the creepy orgy mansion was inspired by his own minicab journeys from St Albans railway station to the famed seclusion of Kubrick’s Hertfordshire country home for script discussions.
Nicole Kidman
The title, Eyes Wide Shut, was Kubrick’s, and in my original piece, I wondered whether it related to the idea of imaginary sexual transgression being as potent as real, waking transgressions. In dreams you see and know things clearly, with your eyes wide shut. It’s only now that I can see another comparison that was always under my nose: Malcolm McDowell’s eyes being clipped wide open in A Clockwork Orange, being forced to watch something horrible. There are other visual echoes, such as the eerie emptiness of the elevator lobbies like those in The Shining – which are part of the film’s artificiality and theatricality, mocked a little by the film’s denigrators at the time, but a part of the hallucinatory effect. Then there is the party scene at the beginning, like something from The Shining, where Alice meets her predatory Hungarian suitor (Sky du Mont) who could almost be a ghost. Kubrick’s use of Stravinsky’s Waltz from his Jazz Suite shows his sweet tooth for mainstream classical-music themes, and his predilection for softcore female nudity is a characteristic thought a bit dated in 1999.
Perhaps what we felt was contrived was that orgy scene, although it is disquieting and strange in the Hammer-horror way that originally impressed me. But by 1999, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho had upped the ante on these ideas of Manhattan super-wealth and depravity, and in comparison, Eyes Wide Shut seemed a tad quaint. Yet now, in the age of Epstein, we can see that it was not so far-fetched to imagine elaborate clubs in which the rich and powerful can disport themselves and exploit the vulnerable. What comes across even more strongly about Eyes Wide Shut now is its chilling emphasis on ruling-class secrecy. This film inspired Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2004), itself underappreciated at the time.
Cruise and Kidman heartfelt and fervent performances (although the flickering black-and-white moments showing her imagined sexual indulgence don’t work). There are tears, and Cruise in particular lays himself open in that fiercely committed way that he tries everything as an actor. Did their actual marital disputes resemble what happen in this film? Maybe. They were divorced two years after this came out, with much gossip about whether the film had accentuated their discontents. Pollack’s performance as Ziegler is thrillingly cynical and disillusioned.
• Eyes Wide Shut is released in the UK on 29 November.
EYES WIDE SHUT: WHAT THE CRITICS FAILED TO SEE IN KUBRICK’S LAST FILM
by Lee Siegel
[Harper’s Magazine]
Eyes Wide Shut is one of the most moving, playful, and complex movies I have ever seen. I love the way Stanley Kubrick expresses the film’s theme of social and psychological doubleness through a double entendre in the film’s very title—Eyes Wide Shut—and through his choice, for the title song, of a waltz by Dmitry Shostakovich, a guileful composer famous for writing music whose subtle motifs seemed to celebrate Stalin but actually undermined him. I love the film’s spare, almost allegorical portrait of the tension and complexity at the heart of a marriage. So imagine my alarm when, picking up one magazine and newspaper after another, I read reviews calling Kubrick’s film a disaster and a titanic error, trite and self-important, one of the worst movies the critics had ever seen.