Full Metal Jacket

Full Metal Jacket (1987) is an astonishing, hard-t0-shake Vietnam movie, one that’s essentially two separate stories smashed together. Director Stanley Kubrick, working from Gustav Hasford’s autobiographical novel The Short-Timers, turns in one of his most effective films. Full Metal Jacket is mesmerizing, sick, terrifying, and funny. It lingers in the brain like a sickness, or a joke that you understand more fully with the passage of time.

I should point out that I’ve never expected to like the films of Stanley Kubrick. It’s probably my hero worship of Pauline Kael, who panned every Kubrick film after Lolita. But ever since watching Barry Lyndon last year, I’ve discovered a real love of Kubrick’s work that makes me feel slightly shameful, perhaps because he seems like a pretentious person’s filmmaker. Barry Lyndon was surprisingly hard to shake off, as was Eyes Wide Shut, and Full Metal Jacket joins them as one of my personal favorite Kubrick films.

The movie opens with a montage of boys—young and dumb, about to be sent to basic training—getting their hair buzzed off by clippers. Then the film cuts to a basic training facility where we’re pummeled by the craftily vulgar screams of relentless drill sergeant Lee Ermey, whose performance is the prototype for the kind of asshole-power-monsters we see in movies like Whiplash (the one where J.K. Simmons plays an asshole of a music teacher, who delights in the aggressive humiliation of his students). I felt more than a little sadistic laughing at the horrifying jeers of Ermey’s character: he berates his grunts with such unmitigated, tenacious fervor that it’s hard not to laugh, until you realize the chilling effect his torment as on one particular young man, the incompetent “Pyle” (Vincet D’Onofrio), who can’t seem to do anything right, and who becomes the pariah of the group when Ermey starts punishing the other guys for his blunders. Watching Pyle lose it is truly one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen in a movie.

When people talk about Vietnam movies, they often obsess over the authenticity of it. Every time I turn around, someone’s telling me about the 2002 film We Were Soldiers, and how that film is the most authentic of all the Vietnam movies, according to the men who actually put their boots to the ground. That may be the case. (I wouldn’t begin to know.) But Full Metal Jacket, whether it perfectly nails an authentic depiction of the war or not, is one of the most jarring, powerful movies about war that I’ve ever seen. Kubrick of course criticizes the politics of the war, as is to be expected, but his criticism transcends the political in showing us just how much the war dehumanizes people.

Of course, the most powerful example of dehumanization happens in basic training, not in combat. It’s D’Onofrio’s transition to madness which stays with us most. The second act, which offers a well-staged descent into a war-torn town where a handful of soldiers face off against a hidden sniper, is tense and extremely well-made, even though it lacks the emotional weight of the first half. It’s still powerful, and when you consider both halves of the film together, you can sense the layers of the war as they happened to the individual soldiers, for whom basic training was a world unto itself, a place where a new identity—the identity of a nationally-vindicated killer—was forged under the auspices of protecting the American way of life.

With Matthew Modine, Arliss Howard, Adam Baldwin, Dorian Harewood, and Kevyn Major Howard. Written by Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford. 

Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut may be Stanley Kubrick’s most underrated movie. There are plenty of people who either love or hate The Shining, Barry Lyndon, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange. But Eyes Wide Shut has been damned with half-hearted praise. Critics pegged it as a good, not great, film, perhaps not wanting to overstate their case in the wake of Kubrick's death, just after he'd previewed the final cut. (Which he likely would have tinkered with even more, had he lived.) Eyes Wide Shut has always been overshadowed by the real-life things happening around it: Kubrick's passing, the film's supposedly lurid subject matter, the on-screen pairing of then husband-and-wife superstars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, playing a husband and wife with sexual problems. Surely all of this mire tainted people’s minds before they even saw the film. And what's more, Eyes Wide Shut is the kind of movie people talk about but never bother to see, having written it off as a dirty movie. But despite the movie's problems, which may be deeper than we think, it is a mesmerizing experience, one that held my interest for the whole two-and-a-half running time (a rare feat). 

The movie is set in New York at Christmastime, and it opens with Bill Harford, a prosperous Manhattan doctor, and his wife Alice, getting dressed for a party: the kind of fancy black tie event that offers a lot of schmoozing opportunities, the kind of thing Bill apparently loves (one of the perks of his profession, he assures Alice) but Alice dreads. Soon after they arrive, Alice adroitly downs a glass of champagne when Bill isn’t looking, and while he’s distracted by rich clients and hot models, she flirts with a Hungarian silver fox who wants to take her upstairs and ravish her. Alice even considers the prospect momentarily, letting it linger in the warm embrace of the champagne. We sense in that moment the tension inside Alice: she wants to be faithful to her husband even as he's annoying her and, even worse, flirting with other women. But then again, she's a woman with desires of her own, and those embers are still warm.

Kubrick channels James Joyce's lovely, pensive "The Dead", the story about a professor named Gabriel Conroy who is shocked to discover that his wife had a romance before him, one that she's never revealed. When Bill and Alice are talking in their bedroom, Alice reveals the contents of her dream—in which she's having multiple sexual partners—and Bill, although he himself has done plenty of flirting with other women—is undone. What's more, Alice had a temptation several years ago, one that she almost acted on. Of course it's understandably shocking to discover your wife has had desires for other men, but it's also ridiculous to think women are somehow incapable of having such desires, and even more ridiculous that men can excuse their own wrong-doing, but be completely undone by their wives'. Bill leaves the apartment ostensibly to make a house call, and eventually descends into a night of debauchery.

The great joke of Eyes Wide Shut is that Bill never actually does anything, even though his evening includes a visit to a prostitute (played by Vinessa Shaw) and later to a mansion on the outskirts of the city where some secret society of rich people has gathered for an elaborate orgy. They’re all adorned in black cloaks and Venetian masks to hide their true identities as they enact weird Pagan-esque rituals and then get down to business. Kubrick presents this prolonged scene as horrific, with throbbing, drawn out music and those costumes amping up a sense of yuppie grotesquerie, the sleazy feeling that rich people, people who run things, are enabled to do anything they want with impunity. 

Tom Cruise is marvelously cast as the designated watcher, much like the passive narrator of The Great Gatsby. Cruise’s good looks make people want to defile him—and he gives them plenty of opportunities—but he’s never willing to go all the way. This proves to be his salvation in Kubrick's puritanical world, because the prostitute he almost sleeps with is later diagnosed with HIV, and one of the girls at the witchy orgy overdoses, shrouding the entire proceedings in grisly darkness, and turning the film into a murder mystery, briefly.

It's the complexity of Bill's character that makes him so fascinating. He has a conscience, and he has temptations, and we get to watch those two impulses wage war against each other. Cruise, who so many have rebuked as a bad actor and nothing more than a pop Hollywood star, works for this movie. He's enough of a blank slate for us to project our own emotions onto him, but he also tries very hard to give Bill Harford depth, and I think his trying, which so rarely profits him, pays off here.

If Eyes Wide Shut makes any false moves, it's in the gradual de-emphasizing of Alice as a major character. For a good long while, they are equals, then it becomes Bill's movie, then, at the very end, the two are on the same level again. Nicole Kidman breathes real passion and pathos into Alice. When Kidman’s on screen, there’s nothing else you’d rather look at. Kubrick perhaps takes this too literally at times, letting the camera gaze on her nude body for no apparent reason other than the prospect of looking at Nicole Kidman. It's the most hypocritical thing about this movie, which really feels quite Victorian in its sexual politics.

But despite its flaws, Eyes Wide Shut is a show-stopping final note from Stanley Kubrick, and one that deserves a re-appraisal. With Sydney Pollack, Todd Field, Marie Richardson, Vinessa Shaw, and Alan Cumming. Written by Kubrick and Frederick Raphael, loosely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's short novel Traumnovelle.

Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon is like one of those prickly old spinsters in a 19th-century novel, one who’s got a reserve of feeling buried deep, deep inside her, beneath all the venom and cruelty (and buried, presumably, in order to bear a lifetime of hardships and disappointments). Stanley Kubrick’s three-hour chamber piece, the meticulously beautiful Barry Lyndon (1975), has garnered a coterie of admirers and detractors over the course of its forty year existence. Lyndon performed poorly at the box office in 1975, and reviewers were generally unkind to it. Pauline Kael wrote that “Kubrick suppresses most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable,” calling the film a “three-hour slide show for art-history majors.”

I must admit, I chuckled over that amusing crack, and to a large extent, I agreed with Kael as I sat tonight in front of this sweeping behemoth of a movie. Critics of Stanley Kubrick almost always point to his cold detachment, and indeed much of Barry Lyndon is both cold and detached. However, I found myself emotionally drawn into the film during the final third, when the consequences of Barry Lyndon’s actions finally come calling on him. This is admittedly a long time to wait for a movie to hit you in the right nerve. It’s also tempting—especially because of the voluminous praise this film has acquired over the years from a number of critics including Jonathan Rosenbaum and Roger Ebert—to be too bowled over by the film’s artistry, to reward Kubrick for spending hours looking for just the right recording of a particular symphony, or congratulate him for fashioning every second of this movie like an 18th-century painting. When we go into a movie, all we have it’s what’s in front of us. And even though film nerds (like myself) are voracious consumers of every detail of a movie’s production, it’s ultimately the finished product we must reckon with, not the hard work or the intent of the director. But is it, as Pauline Kael suggests, denying some vital aspect of the movie-going experience to fall in love with the visuals of a film like Barry Lyndon, even if the movie hasn’t hit you on an emotional level? The answer to that question is entirely personal. My hunch is that people who love Barry Lyndon aren’t just reacting to the film on an artistic level. For them, the movie does connect emotionally. It depends largely on your state of mind throughout the film, and how the tragedies, which line up like dominoes in the last act, affect you as a viewer and where your sympathies lie.

William Makepeace Thackeray, who authored the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, is best known for his Victorian classic Vanity Fair, subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Perhaps the same can be said for Barry Lyndon, and it seems plausible that this idea is one of the things which attracted Stanley Kubrick to the project. The film version ultimately shows us the rot beneath the structure of 18th-century British society, and the opportunistic Irish cad Barry Lyndon, played by Ryan O’Neal, learns how to deftly work within the confines of that structure in order to get what he wants. Of course, Lyndon isn’t exactly rewarded for his caddishness. The film wields an appropriately Victorian disbursement of punishment.

But what’s more interesting than the way the movie punishes its characters is the complexity of those characters. Lyndon is by turns a nasty and a sympathetically stupid character. Sometimes life happens to him, and sometimes life happens because of him, and sometimes death is the consequence. Lyndon at times appears passive, even though he possesses a talent for social climbing and the appropriate absence of moral scruples such movement requires. In the beginning of the movie, Barry is reduced to stupefaction because of his love for his cousin, and when she marries someone else, Barry is humiliated. It’s this betrayal which shapes the rest of Barry Lyndon’s story. Is it the woman’s fault, or is it Barry’s stubborn refusal to accept any kind of rejection?

Ryan O’Neal is somehow perfectly cast in the role of Barry Lyndon, although it is, to borrow a line from critic Michael Gebert, “the best case of miscasting in history.” I mean, who would have imagined Ryan O’Neal, the star of Love Story, as this flawed knave? Yet His moderately hunky American movie star looks work for him. (I kept thinking of Channing Tatum, who is proving himself a viable talent, and who is the kind of modern-day actor people often do not take seriously in dramatic roles, because in their minds they’ve boxed him into a corner.) When O’Neal looks at his ex-lover with those puppy dog eyes, we feel for him. But that feeling soon dissipates as we watch Barry Lyndon cheat and lie and abuse people, and only returns near the end of the film, after several particularly tragic events succeed in giving Barry Lyndon his deserved come-uppance.

The film opens with a duel, shown far away and presented with a comic irony by the narrator (Michael Hordern). Two other duels follow; all three have tremendous weight with the outcome of the characters, and in each one, Kubrick adds some new and interesting critique of a society that tolerated dueling and presented it as something genteel rather than barbarian. The final duel is the most intense, exciting scene in the movie, and Kubrick draws it out masterfully. It’s the duel between Barry and his stepson, Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali). That scene encapsulates the complexity of the characters, because our sympathies alternate between the two of them with stunning ease as each gains and loses the upper-hand. Kubrick depicts how the choices of life and the structure of society work to mold people into a confusing meld of angel and demon.

Yes, Barry Lyndon has a certain amount of pompous self-importance to it that is undeniable; but despite all this, and despite the clinical way Kubrick works, it’s still affecting and powerful. The film understands the complexities of the great Victorian novelists (namely, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, and Trollope), who used sweeping narratives to expose the social evils of their time and were by turns critical and deeply humanistic when it came to nationalism, class structure, and the effects of progress on the working class. Barry Lyndon doesn’t always connect, but it is shattering at times, and beneath the cold exterior, there is humanity, and occasionally even Stanley Kubrick manages to squeeze blood from a stone. 

With Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger, Gay Hamilton, Marie Kean, and Murray Melvin. Cinematography by John Alcott.