David Mikics’s new biography of the totemic US director, Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker, takes an appropriately cool and cerebral approach to its subject matter, writes Dwight Garner.
Pauline Kael was no fan of Stanley Kubrick’s movies.
After all, she’s the critic who wrote, in a dismissal of the 1986 Rob Reiner film Stand by Me, “If there’s any test that can be applied to movies, it’s that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.†A person who feels virtuous after watching a Kubrick movie should be prohibited from owning sharp tools.
David Mikics’s Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker is a cool, cerebral book about a cool, cerebral talent.
“Perfectly controlled schemes get botched through human error or freak accidents, or hijacked by masculine rage.†He unpeels the way that Kubrick’s movies, packed as they are with impieties, challenge, infuriate and entertain.
Writing about Tom Cruise’s awkward performance in Eyes Wide Shut, he reminds us what clicks about it: “Inner torment is never glamorous or sexy in a Kubrick movie.
This book’s subtitle notwithstanding, Kubrick was in many ways the least American of American directors.
Mikics quotes the music critic Alex Ross, who wrote about Kubrick’s movies: “They make me happy, they make me laugh,†Ross said.
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