The movies Stanley Kubrick described as an inaccurate picture of life
While his mastery of the craft can’t be denied, even an all-time directorial great like Stanley Kubrick didn’t manage to end his career completely immune from the withering eye of criticism.
There’s no denying his features were exhaustively researched, extensively planned out, meticulously crafted, and loaded with rich symbolism and resonant thematic motifs. However, that didn’t prevent the filmmaker from being repeatedly labelled as cold, unsentimental, and unfeeling.
Not that it stopped him from helming several of the greatest movies ever made, and it shouldn’t be lost on anybody that one of them is among the finest comedies ever produced. Dr. Strangelove showed that Kubrick did have a funny bone after all. A perfectionist he may have been, but much of his filmography is lacking in the emotional impact so often associated with the finest cinema.
With that in mind, it shouldn’t come as a shock to discover that there was a very particular type of motion picture Kubrick didn’t care for, and it was crafted by another iconic auteur who found their name entering the industry lexicon. Ironically, Capraesque is almost the complete opposite of Kubrickian, with Frank Capra’s oeuvre largely defined by the romanticised ideals of the human condition where the plucky underdog can always be relied on to triumph in the face of adversity.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Kubrick was questioned directly on his perceived lack of sentiment, which he denied. However, while denying it, he did find time to figuratively turn his nose up at Capra’s favoured approach. “I don’t mistrust sentiment and emotion, no,” he said. “The question becomes, are you giving them something to make them a little happier, or are you putting in something that is inherently true to the material?”
Furthering his musings, Kubrick asked another rhetorical question: “Are people behaving the way we all really behave, or are they behaving the way we would like them to behave?”. This led him directly into Capra’s ever-so-slightly fantastical twist on everyday life.
“I mean, the world is not as it’s presented in Frank Capra films. People love those films – which are beautifully made – but I wouldn’t describe them as a true picture of life,” he suggested. “The questions are always: Is it true? Is it interesting? To worry about those mandatory scenes that some people think make a picture is often just pandering to some conception of an audience.”
He certainly wasn’t one for pandering, anyway, although he was forced to acknowledge how “audiences have flocked to see films that are not essentially true”. If every movie was rooted exclusively in real life, then cinema would be a lot less interesting. Even when Kubrick headed beyond the stars with 2001: A Space Odyssey, though, he would treat it as realistically as possible. Needless to say, he and Capra weren’t much alike.
