Shelley Duvall in The Brilliant.
Pictorial press/Alamy
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Pictorial press/Alamy
I was half an hour into a review of the Stanley Kubrick film Halloween season. The shinyI saw it on the big screen for the first time in decades, when it hit me. The actor who carries this film is not Jack Nicholson. This is Shelley Duvall.
Duvall, who died in 2024 at the age of 75, was in her late 20s when she made the film, based on Stephen King’s chilling novel. She endured a punishing schedule of reshoots with Nicholson and Kubrick that left her emotionally exhausted. His performance garnered mixed and often negative reviews and even earned him a nomination for a Razzie Award, which was later rescinded.
What I missed – like many other moviegoers – was the fact that Duvall was doing something subtle. Against the backdrop of a horror film, she delivered a powerful and concrete portrait of Wendy, a woman trapped in a marriage with an increasingly dangerous man.
Nicholson’s performance is always very funny. But nearly half a century after the film’s premiere in 1980, his acting seems a little clownish. His Jack Torrance is a B-movie monster. He smacks his lips, looks at the camera and says “Here’s Johnny!” styling slogans with relish.
Looking back, it’s hard to see any of this working or feeling a little creepy if Duvall hadn’t played the role completely honestly. It’s his performance that anchors the feeling that this is happening in the real world, with real stakes. In fact, when the film begins, Wendy is already experiencing a completely realistic kind of horror.
Her husband is an unemployed former teacher, an aspiring author suffering from writer’s block and a history of alcoholism. He dislocated their son Danny’s shoulder in a drunken rage. This woman is not afraid of ghosts. She is afraid of the man sleeping in her bed. Duvall makes it all terribly plausible.
I remembered Wendy as a dreary victim, a sort of punching bag, knocked down by Jack’s blazing, thieving rage. She grimaces, she simpers, she screams then she runs away. The film’s poster shows his remarkable American Gothic-style face transformed into a scream.
But it turns out that Duvall’s Wendy is actually a sort of proto-action hero. After the family arrives at the haunted Overlook Hotel, it’s Wendy who proves to be the right person. Jack is the official caretaker, but while he bitches and sulks, Wendy runs the heating system, stays in touch with the rangers, monitors the weather, cooks, and learns the lay of the land.
Which makes what happens next believable. As Jack begins to change, Wendy becomes suspicious. She watches Danny more closely. She arms herself with a baseball bat. When Jack turns into a literal shuffling ogre, Wendy is terrified, of course, but she’s also completely ready to kick his ass.
In their first fight, she knocks him out, then drags his dead weight up a flight of stairs and locks him in a freezer. “Your wife seems to be stronger than we imagined, Mr. Torrance, a little more resourceful,” mocks Grady the ghost. “She seems to have gotten the better of you.”
Indeed. And Duvall makes it work. A year after Sigourney Weaver played the hero in Stranger and four years before Linda Hamilton gave us Sarah Connor in The terminatorDuvall’s subtle, evolving performance made Wendy a warrior with haunted battles.
The scenario of The Brilliant, co-written by Diane Johnson, cleverly leads the audience to expect Danny’s supernatural powers to save the day. Or maybe Dick Hallorann will come to our rescue. But in the end, it’s all up to Wendy.
If you haven’t watched The Shining in a while, give it another look, especially the final scenes. Nicholson’s Jack puts on a raucous show. He shouts threats, breaks down doors, and even murders poor Hallorann with an axe. But he never manages to get his hands on his wife or his son. Duvall’s Wendy stays one step ahead of him, showing off the main character’s energy until the end.
Gn entert
