The Shining, Part 2: King's Version

The book: see previous post.

The movie: Stephen King wanted to make a more faithful adaptation of her own novel, and ended up writing this three-part miniseries. Directed by Mick Garris, Stephen King's The Shining came out in 1997. The leading roles were taken over by Steven Weber, Rebecca DeMornay and Courtland Meade. It's an adaptation and not a remake of Kubrick's version, but the comparisons are inevitable, so I'm going to keep making them.

Plot differences: The miniseries goes over pretty much all events in the book, with some minor scene omissions. The biggest omission, in my opinion, is the flashback to the night when Jack and his friend Al drove over someone - whose body they never found - and this made them seek help for their alcoholism. I thought this was an important event in the book, but for some reason, King has chosen to leave out most of the flashbacks. A more detailed account of why Jack beat up his student is also left out.

A scene is added to the end where we see Danny graduate, and it is revealed that "Tony" is in fact an older version of Danny (even if it's never explained how he went into the past to warn Danny). Danny also sees a vision of his dead father looking at him with pride. It's a bit after-the-fact, considering the book came out 20 years earlier, but since it's written by the original author, I'll give it a pass. It does give the movie a bit of closure and an uplifting ending - perhaps more so than the original ending of the book.

Character differences: Wendy's mother and Jack's student are mentioned, but not fleshed out much, in the miniseries. Again, this isn't much of a loss. I don't recall any other real omissions.

Author opinion: Written by the original author, who also provided a commentary track on the DVD. I haven't listened to it yet, but I might edit this part after I do, if he mentions any disappointments or particular delights in the miniseries.

My opinion:
Like I said in the previous post, I really like the book, and was sad to see how much Kubrick had omitted. But but. Making a literal translation isn't always the best way to make a movie, and I stand by what I said in the Pet Sematary post: King can write books but not movie scripts. This isn't his worst, by any means, and compared to Pet Sematary, it's actually pretty good. But there are certain major flaws. The biggest one is that some things needed to be omitted to make the story fit into a miniseries arc, and I think King made the wrong choices there.

We didn't really need to know so much about the hotel or Denver croquet, or see the janitor blow his nose that many times. The first episode, in particular, suffers from too much focus on the hotel and too little on the family. Things start picking up in episode two, but the pacing is still a bit off. For a series airing once a week, it must have lost a lot of viewers after the first episode, because basically nothing was happening.

Pretty much everything I said about Kubrick's version applies here, only in reverse. We get to know the characters and empathize with them, and that makes the story more relatable. It was nice to see them go to the nearby city before the snow came, shopping and seeing a doctor and stuff, things a normal person would have done in that situation. The Kubrick movie made it seem like they spent the entire time at the hotel, even when it wasn't snowing yet. The family members' reactions to the events seem more realistic here, and the domestic violence and alcoholism are given much more focus. The characters become more alive, more real, than they were in the Kubrick version.

The horror part doesn't work equally well. The realistic, calm family scenes take away from the tension and fear, even after scary stuff starts happening. The visuals are poor and the CGI effects do nothing to scare me. I realize they worked with a much smaller budget, but they could have gone for a classier "less is more" approach and made the low budget look good, and they didn't. The attacking topiary, in particular, looks pathetically unreal - come on, the topiary in the book wasn't that scary anyway. They're made of twigs and leaves! How can they bite you? The depiction of Tony is pretty faithful to the book, but his hovering in the air is a lame visual gimmick. Even the hotel they used as the setting is far from impressive-looking. The camera keeps panning onto the furniture that moves ever-so-slightly by itself, but you can only do that so many times without annoying the viewer, if the furniture never does anything eevil. There's a lack of real scares.

There is one scene I want to praise, however, and that is the lady in the bath tub. Now this was scary with a capital S, much scarier than in Kubrick's film. The teaser scenes with Danny standing at the door, his irresistable urge to go in, and finally meeting the woman in the bath tub, all worked very well to create suspense and horror. The look of madness on the woman's face is so horrifying that I hardly slept at all the night I saw the miniseries. It really got under my skin. The scene where Jack goes back to check if there's something in that room is very scary too. Great work from King and Garris.

The casting, then. Jack Nicholson was too creepy and crazy-seeming; Steven Weber is too non-creepy in the beginning. He gives a surprisingly good madman performance, but his "nice Daddy" scenes are ruined with bad humor. I'm not sure if the one-liners and Elvis impersonations are ad-libbed or in the script, but they bug and serve to drag down the mood of the film. In addition, he acts like he's acting, which probably comes from his sitcom background. He's not awful, though; he's much better than Dale Midkiff in the lead of Pet Sematary. Maybe with different direction, he would have done a really good job. Rebecca DeMornay does a credible Wendy - and leaves a stronger impression than Shelly DuVall's version -, but she, too, is given annoying one-liners.

The biggest problem is Danny. Courtland Meade's performance leaves a lot to be desired. He overacts in almost every scene; I realize he's a child and it's a very difficult role to get right, but surely they could have found a better child actor for the role. Danny's central role in the story is somewhat ruined by Meade's acting, which is a shame. This is one clear shortcoming compared to the Kubrick version, where Danny Lloyd does a surprisingly good job in the role.

Also: "Kissing, kissing" - "That's what I've been missing". What the hell was that? It's not in the book, it makes no sense, it's a very lame way to show closeness between father and son. One of King's weaknesses as a script writer is adding corny little things like that. Those scenes take away from the credibility of the characters.

The miniseries has its moments, but as usual, the original book is the best way to get to the characters and the story.