Movie City Indie: Throwing bones in the air as <i>2001</i> turns 40

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April 02, 2008

Throwing bones in the air as 2001 turns 40

STANLEY KUBRICK's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY had its world premiere April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. Which would mean that Roger Ebert had been in the Sun-Times pages for just over a year when this review ran: "It was e. e. cummings, the poet, who said he'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance. I imagine cummings would not have enjoyed Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space
Odyssey, in which stars dance but birds do not sing. The fascinating thing about this film is that it fails on the human level but succeeds magnificently on a cosmic scale."

When he Great-Movied the film in 1997, Ebert wrote, "The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in 2001: A Space Odyssey but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, 2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe."

Variety's reviewer at the time, one Robert B. Frederick (who likely wrote in the Variety style of the time under a handle like Fred.), averred the damn thing was just too "personal." "Stanley Kubrick is alive and well and living in Outer Space. Those filmgoers who have wondered what happened to the man who gave screen birth to Lolita and Dr. Strangelove can stop worrying. He's taken up a new hobby—science-fiction—and his first effort comes close to running away with itself. One criticism that will be raised is that film cost too much for so "personal" (i.e. Kubrick) a film... A major achievement in cinematography and special effects, 2001 lacks dramatic appeal to a large degree and only conveys suspense after the halfway mark. Despite the enormous technical staff involved in making the film, it is almost entirely one man's conception and Kubrick must receive all the praise—and take all the blame."

The famously sniffish Renata Adler got to weigh in during her short-lived reign at the New York Times: "There is one ultimate science-fiction voyage of a man (Keir Dullea) through outer and inner space, through the phases of his own life in time thrown out of phase by some higher intelligence, to his death and rebirth in what looked like an intergalactic embryo... Its real energy seem to derive from that bespectacled prodigy reading comic books around the block. The whole sensibility is intellectual fifties child: chess games, bodybuilding exercises, beds on the spacecraft that look like camp bunks, other beds that look like Egyptian mummies, Richard Strauss music, time games, Strauss waltzes, Howard Johnson's, birthday phone calls... [T]he uncompromising slowness of the movie makes it hard to sit through without talking—and people on all sides when I saw it were talking almost throughout the film. Very annoying. With all its attention to detail—a kind of reveling in its own I.Q.—the movie acknowledged no obligation to validate its conclusion for those, me for example, who are not science-fiction buffs. By the end, three unreconciled plot lines—the slabs, Dullea's aging, the period bedroom—are simply left there like a Rorschach, with murky implications of theology. This is a long step outside the convention, some extra scripts seem required, and the all-purpose answer, 'relativity,' does not really serve unless it can be verbalized."

This may have been a common response: condescension posing as some form of intellectual purity. Of negative reviews from Adler, John Simon, Judith Crist and Andrew Sarris, Kubrick observed in a Playboy interview, "The four critics you mention all work for New York publications. The reviews across America and around the world have been 95% enthusiastic. Some were more perceptive than others, of course, but even those who praised the film on relatively superficial grounds were able to get something of its message. New York was the only really hostile city. Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema, But film critics, fortunately, rarely have any effect on the general public; houses everywhere are packed and the film is well on its way to becoming the greatest moneymaker in M-G-M's history. Perhaps this sounds like a crass way to evaluate one's work, but I think that, especially with a film that is so obviously different, record audience attendance means people are saying the right things to one another after they see it—and isn't this really what it's all about?"

That Playboy interview (date unknown) contains 12 questions for Kubrick about 2001" "The very nature of the visual experience in 2001 is to give the viewer an instantaneous, visceral reaction that does not—and should not—require further amplification. Just speaking generally, however, I would say that there are elements in any good film that would increase the viewer's interest and appreciation on a second viewing; the momentum of a movie often prevents every stimulating detail or nuance from having a full impact the first time it's seen. The whole idea that a movie should be seen only once is an extension of our traditional conception of the film as an ephemeral entertainment rather than as a visual work of art. We don't believe that we should hear a great piece of music only once, or see a great painting once, or even read a great book just once. But the film has until recent years been exempted from the category of art—a situation I'm glad is finally changing."