Years after his ordeal
at the Overlook hotel Danny Torrance has grown up to become his father Jack. He
is just as troubled and self-destructive.But unlike his father he gets a second chance to become a better person by protecting a young girl, Abra, who has the supernatural power called ‘the Shining’, just like him.
Dr. Sleep is one of those movies that made me think about
‘movie theory’ in general a lot more than the actual movie review itself.
There’s just so much to talk about on a lot of different levels.
Just like The Overlook hotel has many different doors that
Danny Torrance rides by on his tricycle this review will, from time to time,
quick fire ‘door after door’ of movie theoretical questions at you.
Good book, bad movie.
Bad book, good movie.
Comparing a book to a movie is a tricky business. You’re more likely to hear: “The book was
better” than the other way around. The reason for this is simple: if a book is
good not only is it already quite a daunting task to put it on screen just (as
good) as it was written. But, also, more people have read the book. So there
are a lot more potential criticasters.
In this sense you could also make the distinction between
‘popular’ and ‘obscure’.
A fun thing happens, however, if a director successfully
manages to adapt a book to a movie: people tend to forget the original book.
Hardly anybody knows that Psycho was once a book. And I doubt the people who
do, have actually read it. The same goes for Jaws, Rosemary’s Baby and (I’m
certain this will happen in my lifetime) Jurassic Park.
If you can name the writers connected to these books you
get a virtual cookie with my compliments.
If a movie adaptation was a success it’ll henceforth be the
movie first with the book, almost, an afterthought.
Which brings me to Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick.
In 1981 Kubrick produced a masterpiece of a movie called The
Shining (1981) based on King’s bestseller of the same name. But since the
original book and the movie are so vastly different (and because the author is
still a successful writer I might add) two ‘cultural objects’ started to exist
side-by-side. Each with its own author: Kubrick’s The Shining (the movie) and
King’s The Shining (the original novel).
The mini-series (1997), lovely as it is, doesn’t really
exist in this ‘auteur’ sense.
And if there’s one big critique I have to give the 2019
adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining is that the movie, in the
end, tries too hard to incorporate both authors.
Stephen King’s Dr.
Sleep.
I bought the book the day it came out and started to read.
And, I have to admit, at first I was disappointed. The book didn’t take place
in a haunted hotel but was rather more a road-trip. The Danny Torrance
character was an abysmal human being (in the first fifty pages or so). And the
villains didn’t seem half as threatening as I wanted them to be (going up
against super-power humans and all).
But the book grew on me the minute I realized that Dr. Sleep
is all about addiction. Where the first book destroyed the addicted Jack
Torrance in a self-destructive manner. Dr. Sleep actually offered Danny
Torrance-who is on the same destructive path as his father, Jack-a way out.
The villains here are those ‘new’ addicts willing to
destruct others for their own gain. And they are represented as a vampiric-cult
known as the ‘True knot’ lead by the maleficent woman named Rose the hat.
More precise, the Knot’s addiction isn’t akin to alcoholism
in the sense of ‘drinking one’s emotional pain away’ but rather drug-addiction
of ‘getting the next shot because it is needed to ‘stay’ at any cost’.
Realizing this I could read Dr. Sleep as it really was. The
book is not a retracing of the old steps but a re-exploration of the original
themes by an older author whilst telling an entirely new story in a new
setting. Yes it uses the same characters and the same hocus-pocus as before,
but at a minimal since those things aren’t really important.
Dr. Sleep is basically an older Stephen King telling the
reader (through Danny) about the dangers of addiction, the possibility of
salvation and also, by including a Shining-little girl named Abra, the
importance of parenting, educating and preparing the next generation.
By the way, the Overlook hotel got destroyed in the first novel. So
in Dr. Sleep the finale takes place at the ruins of the Overlook.
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Flanagan’s Dr. Sleep.
Dr. Sleep, therefore, is a very filmable book. There is a
main character who looks like sh*t for the first fifty pages or so. Then he
gets clean-shaven and is ‘ready to go’. The main villain, then, wears a very
distinctive hat. It is all very visual.
So getting the shooting script together for this movie is
rather easy. The dialogue is often already pretty solid. Only some subplots
that would take the movie slightly off course (e.g. there are a lot of driving
scenes in the novel) had to be removed to streamline it a bit.
And because the source material is already so visual, so is
the dressing and the tone of the movie. The locations, landscapes, the ways
characters look are all there on the page.
The big hurdle is, as always, the casting. Luckily King
movies can nowadays pretty much call any actor in the world and he/she will
accept. For Dr. Sleep the casting directors called Ewan McGregor as Dan
Torrance, Rebecca Ferguson as Rose the Hat and Kyliegh Curran as Abra Stone.
McGregor is quite fitting as the tormented Torrance. Playing
his character far more internally than he normally would he fits the profile of
a man wanting to survive himself just another day.
I loved the (slightly sick) mention of a Shallow grave
(1994).
Curran as Abra, then, is actually rather impressive as the
youthful enthusiastic ‘Shiner’ who doesn’t know what dangers lie on the
horizon.
She has a wonderful power scene in a car (was she wearing
contacts that time?).
If I would give the character any faults it is that she is
(as in the book) overpowered and hardly ever gets hurt like Danny does. But
that’s character, not actress.
But the real steal of the show is Ferguson as Rose the Hat.
What is it with Stephen King adaptations and conjuring up wonderful female
villains? Rose The Hat as played by Ferguson is far more sinister and vile than
her book counterpart. Every moment she’s on screen you fear that she might do
something dastardly; even when she’s speaking to her lover (even though I doubt
this character can love) Crow Daddy (Zahn McClarnon).
But this is the strength of movie adaptations. Good movies
allow actors to become their characters, to live them. Mike Flanagan
understands this perfectly well in Dr. Sleep (not so much in The haunting of
Hill House (2018)).
By focussing just a handful of scenes on the newest ‘True knot’-troupe member Snakebite Andi (Emily
Alyn Lind) and her interacting with the others the actors gain the momentum to
become real humans even though their core characters are supernatural and
single-minded –thus, prone to two dimensionality.
As always it is fun to see the wonderful Carel Struycken
in a genre piece again.
He really is Hollywood’s go-to strange man (this is a
compliment).
BTW it is hinted at quite strongly in the movie that his Grandpa Flick
character is a Strigoi.
Left on Flanagan’s table are the shots/scenes he wants to
pull for this movie. Sometimes he pulls the camera back and lets the wide-open
shots overtake the screen for a fantasy-element (like Rose the Hat looking for Ebra,
or the tilting room scene). Whereas, when true bloody horror is needed, he
closes in on the victim and his/her torment.
And yes the horror in this movie is as brutal as the
opening scene of IT: Chapter one (2017).
It’s a polite (textbook) playing with the camera that is
never distracting or overtly artistic. It is only when the big finale comes to
show that Flanagan can no longer control himself.
By the way, the Overlook hotel didn’t get destroyed in Kubrick’s The
Shining. So in Dr. Sleep the finale takes place at the boarded up –but intact- Overlook.
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The Shining greatest
hits.
Comparing ´The Shining´-scene in Spielberg’s Sci-fi spectacle to Dr. Sleep’s finale one thing becomes obvious. There is a lot less CGI tomfoolery in Flanagan’s hotel. This is absolutely a plus. I applaud Spielberg for the wonderful visual eye he has but the last ten years or so he relied far too much on CGI when it wasn’t really needed.
Intermezzo
This reliance on CGI is a tricky one for me because I sometimes
applaud it (e.g. recreating the ‘70s skyline in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007))
and sometimes I just don’t see the point. For instance: I never quite
understood David Fincher digitally cloning an actor’s face over another actor
to create twins in The social network (2010). Why not hire...I don’t know...real
twins? Like Linda Hamilton’s sister for that wonderful deleted scene from
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991).
Fun fact: Ewan McGregor once got himself ‘cloned’ over another actor
(a lot less technical than the ‘Fincher technique’) in Last days in the
desert (2015). But, then again, in that movie he was playing both Jesus
Christ of Nazareth and Satan. Same father and all.
So on some kind of artistic level it isn’t much of a stretch to cast
the same actor for both parts (like George Burns famously did in Oh, God! You Devil (1984) as
both God and the Devil).
CGI can do anything...but should it?
Naturally this CGI discussion is currently also being held on related subjects as ‘de-aging’ actors as
Scorsese did for The Irishman (2019). The question here being, of course, how
much de-aging can a person put in a movie. Should it be a little bit for a
flashback or two (e.g. Ant-man (2015)) or is it allowed for the entire movie?
The second subject is the current morality debate going on about
resurrecting actors (e.g. Star Wars: rogue one (2016)). Would Peter Cushing
have reprised his role if he was still alive (immortal)? If he refused would
the studio honour his wish?
In this sense I consider it refreshing that Flanagan decided against
‘recreating’ Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers or even Danny
Lloyd. The movie doesn’t need that. And the audience is more than happy to
accept these new actors in the parts.
But this does bring forth a nice dilemma. Because the recreated 2019
Overlook hotel in Dr Sleep is
–visually- one hundred percent the same as the 1981 original. So now we’ve
got ‘new faces’ running around in a familiar set. The reason for this I’ll
explain after this intermezzo.
Sufficient to say here is that because the finale of Dr. Sleep uses
so many visual elements from the original The Shining movie the actors
actually feel ‘wrong’ or ‘out of place’ almost in the same way those deepfake
face-swaps of famous, well known, movie scenes feel wrong.
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But, then I do give Spielberg credit for ‘playing
around’-for want of a better word- with Kubrick’s classic. The ‘The
Shining-scene’ works marvellously in Ready Player One because the movie is filled
to the brim with pop-culture references. And it’s not like Spielberg is
blatantly making an exact copy of the original movie. He inserts a completely
bonkers storyline with out-of-tune characters. Only the backdrop of the haunted
hotel is the same the rest is refreshingly new.
This is where Flanagan fails in his big finale for Dr.
Sleep: he recreates too much! I was in awe the moment Danny Torrance re-entered
the hotel of his childhood fears. The place looked exactly the same. But then
what does Flanagan do? He painstakingly recreates various shots and moments
from the original.
I did enjoy the ‘doctor’s office’-scene earlier in the
movie (with the great Bruce Greenwood,
another King-movie alumni) since it is
the same (incorrectly placed) office as it is in The Shining.
If only Flanagan
stayed with these little pokes of fun here and there.
He doesn’t show us a new part of the hotel; a spot Kubrick’s
movie has never been (like the attic).
No, he lets Dan(ny) take a tour to see all the highlights (The gold room, room 237, the Redrum-door, the elevators, the staircase, the maze. Only the kitchen and the red bathroom are missing). And at each of these locations he uses the exact same shots as Kubrick’s version.
No, he lets Dan(ny) take a tour to see all the highlights (The gold room, room 237, the Redrum-door, the elevators, the staircase, the maze. Only the kitchen and the red bathroom are missing). And at each of these locations he uses the exact same shots as Kubrick’s version.
He relies on this so much so that when the movie misses a
beat (e.g. Danny riding his tricycle through the hall –‘new’ Danny has a
different riding technique than ‘old’ Danny, apparently) it actually registers
–to me- as a faux pas. It takes me out of the scene because I’m unwittingly
(and unwillingly) comparing the shots.
I’m left to wonder why I was put in this position in the
first place? I can understand the fun of recreating a shot or two (like the
drive-up to The Overlook) as both an in-joke and a homage. But after that the
movie really should have started to create its own shots. There are more than
one way to shoot a stair-scene.
And that’s just the camera-angle and the montage I’m talking
about here. The finale also recreates choreography, dialogue and, apparently,
only the original movie’s amount of ghosts.
If there’s one movie in which Flanagan could’ve used his,
now famous, ‘ghosts lurking in the shadows’-trick
that he pulled before in The
haunting of Hill House it would’ve been this movie.
According to the first book there are hundreds, maybe even
thousands of souls at The Overlook.
This is a shame since Dr. Sleep started so well with
focussing on the Stephen King/book-lore instead of the Kubrick-lore.
Back at the Overlook
hotel.
The streamlined plot then, works a charm with very little
unnecessary moments. Which, for what is basically a road-movie, is quite a feat
as those movies have a tendency to meander all over the place.
Then there are the various visual tricks the movie pulls
that are always greatly imaginative. Even in the scenes where the movie runs
the risk over overdoing itself it reels itself back in just in time and lets
suggestion take centre stage. Dr. Sleep
(for the first three quarters of the movie) knows what kind of story it is
telling. It’s telling a Stephen King story.
But then, for the great finale, the movie shifts gear and
goes into blatant Kubrick territory. Suddenly the movie needs to tie itself to
the cinematic masterpiece (that won two razzies in) of 1981 instead of the
book. It is this heavy-handed connecting with the original in the final act
that doesn’t sit well with me. A more loose approach would’ve been appreciated.
Still, for any The Shining fan Dr. Sleep is a must see
movie. But, in my mind, it is best to see it as one of the better book
adaptation of the original author than something that comes even close to the vision
of that ‘other’ author.
