KUBRICK: An Odyssey, by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams
The passions, obsessions, habits, talents and fears that shaped the extraordinary movies of Stanley Kubrick were well chewed over in his lifetime. Some of the reporting came from those who knew him; other impressions came from journalists who didn’t know him, but enjoyed the digging. It was easy quarrying, because there was so much rich topsoil. A son of the Bronx who became the self-styled squire of Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, England, Kubrick was a visionary filmmaker whose greatest works — including “Paths of Glory” and “Dr. Strangelove,” “Lolita” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “The Shining” and “A Clockwork Orange” — are as vital and prescient about culture and society today as they were when they blazed through the second half of the 20th century.
But for Kubrick to be Kubrick took so much fussing on his part, and scurrying on the part of others! He had his routines, his rituals, his ways of working. He immersed himself in slow-simmering, yearslong research to decide on whatever his next project was going to be; he insisted on many many many many takes for each camera shot, with a commitment to “perfection” — the usual term used — that regularly drained those around him, including actors and crew, family and friends, artistic collaborators and insurance claims adjusters. (He filed work-related insurance claims as regularly as other people floss. Surprisingly, there is no record of how diligently Kubrick flossed.)
A short list of the man’s insatiable interests included sex, the Holocaust, chess, Freud, Napoleon, the treacheries of marriage and the works of the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. Schnitzler’s 1926 novella “Traumnovelle” — “Dream Story” — simmered within Kubrick for decades until it became “Eyes Wide Shut,” his last film. The simmering shows, in a movie as impermeable and deracinated as it is weirdly mesmerizing, not least because the galactic movie star Tom Cruise and his then-wife, Nicole Kidman, went all in for Kubrick’s fevered ride.
With a slender 13 features in his filmography, Kubrick operated at a painstaking crawl. After an absence of a dozen years, he was completing “Eyes Wide Shut” when he died of a heart attack in 1999, at the age of 70. (The son of a doctor, he distrusted doctors.) And then the real chewing over of Stanley Kubrick’s work and life began.
Frederic Raphael, who collaborated with Kubrick on the screenplay for “Eyes Wide Shut,” jumped in quickly with a memoir. Michael Herr, who worked with Kubrick on the screenplay for “Full Metal Jacket,” wrote a memoir. Kubrick’s personal driver wrote a memoir. “The Stanley Kubrick Archives,” published in 2008, dazzled with its handsome presentation of so much of the man’s project-related stuff. The film scholar Robert P. Kolker analyzed the work of Kubrick in an expanded edition of “A Cinema of Loneliness” in 2011. Nathan Abrams, a professor of film studies with a special interest in the intersection of Jewishness and cinema, published “Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual” in 2018. Kolker and Abrams together produced “Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film” in 2019.
Kolker and Abrams are not done. In the manner of the master himself, peering at a subject with an absorption that confounds less pointed minds, the two now mark the 25th anniversary of the filmmaker’s death with “Kubrick: An Odyssey.” The book is billed as “definitive,” and sure, let’s say it is. It is also touted for the addition of new interviews with family members, and that part is evident. In her extended commentary, Kubrick’s widow, Christiane Kubrick, wants readers to know that her husband was not the tyrannical, cold, reclusive, obsessive, secretive, difficult genius others have said he was, but a wonderful, warm, easygoing guy. The authors, meanwhile, would like to remind everyone at regular intervals that Kubrick was Jewish, even when he ignored it.
Noted. And agreed, too, that those who are devoted to the study of Kubrick’s life as a key to the Scriptures of his movies form a self-selecting book club for whom every detail of the creator’s existence is worth savoring. (This one is: The Scottish actor Alan Cumming, who played a hotel clerk in one scene of “Eyes Wide Shut,” described the director as “a Hobbit version of Salman Rushdie.”)
What is there, then, in one more biography of Kubrick for the rest of us? The rest of us who, while loving the streaks of wholly original brilliance in his work, are less impressed with the number of takes required to meet the director’s satisfaction and more impatient with the patience with which so many put up with so much for so long in the name of one man’s art? “What we learn from the myriad stories about Kubrick,” the biographers write, with the bland wording of a state-controlled news service, “is that he was uncompromising and so singularly focused on the task at hand that he could well be oblivious to others’ feelings and needs. He needed to get what he wanted. Or, if he didn’t exactly know what he wanted, he would push everyone to help him find it.”
Maybe it’s the current rancid air quality, maybe it’s the dawning of the age of #MeToo, maybe it’s reading too many think pieces about “art monsters,” but my tolerance for the behavior of geniuses oblivious to the feelings and needs of others is at an all-time low. I don’t expect the authors of a family-friendly biography to go rogue and declare their dismay at the human toll paid by so many in Kubrick’s orbit. (The authors counter the much-reported abusive behavior directed toward Shelley Duvall during the making of “The Shining” with “the cold fact that Kubrick elicited from her a performance of anxious, hysterical strength.”) But that doesn’t mean I need to spend any more time with the late Stanley Kubrick than I — a person who loves much of his work, and has no plans to lose his number or cancel him from my consciousness of great filmmakers of the 20th century — already have. If I never read another sentence about the man behind the movies, that works for me.
KUBRICK: An Odyssey | By Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams | Pegasus | 649 pp. | $35
