MovieMartyr.com - Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures

Perhaps because its subject’s brother-in-law directed it and perhaps because it feels as if Warner Bros. has bankrolled it, Jan Harlan’s adulatory documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures gives the impression at times that filmic history is being rewritten before our eyes. That’s not to imply that it’s not put together well. The two and a half hour running time flies by quickly, and the many exclusive interviews included provide some genuine insight into the man behind such landmark films as 2001. Kubrick’s story and attitudes are so well known by cineastes that the only way a feature without grand factual revelations about the man can make his tale seem fresh is by providing first hand accounts of working with the man, so this documentary’s flaws don’t lie in its approach. Tracing his career and personal life chronologically from birth until death, the film certainly serves well as a refresher course to those familiar with the director’s works. For those who haven’t seen Kubrick’s oeuvre, it might prove a detrimental viewing experience, however, since several of his movies’ endings are freely spoiled.

I’m no Kubrick scholar, having only a slightly above average knowledge of his work, but the portrayal of the director offered in this film still seemed suspect to me. The most glaring omission is the fact that Kubrick was fired from the production of the Marlon Brando vehicle One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Coming as it did after the director’s clashes with Kirk Douglas on the set of Spartacus, this experience must have been instrumental in Kubrick’s decision to insist upon total creative control on his future projects. To gloss over the experience entirely is to ignore a major event in the director’s development. Any problems with historical accuracy seem less severe when compared to the film’s simple-minded deification of its subject, however. In the film’s eyes, Kubrick never made a film that was anything less than a masterpiece. Any interviewees that might have criticized his work have been shuttled off-screen. His decision to remove several of his early films from circulation is never really called into question. The way that narrator Tom Cruise intones “his only Oscar ever” as he describes his 2001 Special Effects award win makes the slight sound tantamount to a cardinal sin. Furthermore, there is a repeated insistence that Kubrick was an utterly normal, social, and congenial guy. Obviously, the myth of Stanley Kubrick has overtaken the reality of Stanley Kubrick, but the doggedness expressed in debunking the perception that Kubrick was a hermit soon becomes tiresome, and a bit silly, frankly. I enjoy Kubrick’s films as much as anyone, but I simply don’t understand the need to make his genius more human. I am perfectly content to approach his intelligence like the black monoliths in 2001: able to appreciate it, but not sure that I'll ever fully understand it except as something other than my own.

* * 1/2

4-16-02

Jeremy Heilman