Stanley Kubrick, whose misanthropy was novel at the time, but in our era of performative cynicism and “tough-mindedness” hasn’t aged well.
Truly, the OP clearly states: “Clever films, novel aesthetics, an experience to cherish but not to tear down and examine” IRT Wes Anderson and the Coens. But that’s a pretty good rule of thumb in general. One of the smartest things any character in a movie said about it themselves was William Hurts’ in The Big Chill: “You’re so analytical! Sometimes you just have to let art… flow… over you.“
However,
Stanley Kubrick started his career in an age of a level of mawkish sentimentality unbelievable to us today: irreconcilable to any intelligent person on its own, but combined with that same eras’ grinding heel of HUAC/McCarthyism upon intelligent, creative (and, often like Kubrick himself, Jewish) Americans, it’s no surprise that his work is a rejection of sentimentality. Telling that his breakthrough, The Killing, was a Film Noir.
John Ford is at the other side; as interesting mentally and visually as Kubrick, but Ford’s sentimentality is laid on so thick as to make your eyes roll. A more clear cut divide between two filmmakers vis a vie sentimentality and cynicism is hard to find. (Although can be found: between Chaplin and Keaton. Buster didn’t care about his guy, just the gags. Charlie desperately did, and in it he revealed the poison seed of sentimentality: self-pity. And lord how Chaplin did wallow in that.)
But there is the paradox of realism and sentimentality: to realistically portray people, you have to account for their propensity to sentimentality. The great Realist novelist like Dreiser and Steinbeck knew this. Filmmakers display this capacity through their actors. And that’s where Kubrick comes up short. The only actor who won an Oscar in a Stanley Kubrick movie was Peter Ustinov in Spartacus; which Kubrick himself didn’t consider to really be a Kubrick movie.
In comparison look at a movie like The Last Picture Show, which could only be a movie about horny teenage boys who live in the middle of nowhere and whose live don’t really matter. But then, out of nowhere, great actresses give amazing performances.
Or have a look at the movies of William Wyler; (Sister) Carrie, and The Heiress (both great movies for actresses), The Best Years of Our Lives, etc. Or from Japan: Ozo and Kurosawa: stories of ordinary people’s lives can be shown without resorting to stupid sentimentality. Movies like The Manchurian Candidate can make the audience empathize with unlikable characters. But nobody was invited to empathize with Barry Lyndon. That wasn’t the point. Then what was the point? Advanced cinematography?
Kubrick wasn’t interested in that. Great actors like Jack Nicholson are few and far between the dullard Dullea, O’Neal and Cruise. Stanley was so smart, so his stories didn’t need smart storytellers besides himself.
So of course there reaches a horseshoe of cynicism with sentimentality. Henry Fonda came to blows with John Ford because Fonda wanted Mr. Robert’s to show war as stupid, brutal and dehumanizing, while Ford only wanted a jolly service comedy. Kirk Douglass insisted Paths of Glory include the weeping soldiers in the canteen before they were sent to the deaths they knew awaited them, but thirty years later, free from interference, Kubrick ended Full Metal Jacket with its Marines singing not a tearful Faithful Hussar but the Mickey Mouse theme song, inexplicably oblivious to their own mortality despite seeing their own comrades easily wiped out earlier that day.
2001 ends with the Starchild in orbit. In the source novel it’s blandly watching the earth burning in nuclear war. And that’s the most Kubrick shot there could be: above it all, and it’s all rather pointless. Shall we set the chessboard up again?
