In a near-future Britain, young Alexander DeLarge and his pals get their kicks beating and raping anyone they please. When not destroying the lives of others, Alex swoons to the music of Beethoven....
WHAT I LIKED: 'A Clockwork Orange' is another comical, theatrical film about humanity from Stanley Kubrick, but here he broadcasts a particularly dark and damming future. Indeed, in the words of the legendary Mark Kermode, Kubrick offers only two options for his central character Alex under this society - life as a raping, murdering, antisocial thug with a god-given free will, or (after belittling the usual justice system) as a conformist slave living under the law out of necessity rather than choice. It's a very narrow view, but it's unsurprisingly one painted extremely well by Kubrick as the first half portrays Alex's evil acts with truly visceral and yet typically tongue-in-cheek horror, and the second half showcases the controlling nature of this future state equally vividly. It's all-consuming but also fairly amusing thanks to Kubrick's usual out-of-place, over-the-top use of music (in this case it's a whole lot of Beethoven), his sublime set-design which delivers a tangible sense of a starkly different, very twisted future, and as much off-kilter whit from the script as you'd expect.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: The problem is however that whilst Kubrick is clearly a filmmaker very interested in humanity, he's not generally one overly concerned with humans, and that's quite a problem here. The bottom line is that Clockwork Orange has a much more character-based narrative than '2001' or 'Dr Strangelove,' and yet the way it deals Alex is confusing and awkward. He's painted as extremelly vile and disgusting in the first half, and yet as soon as he winds up in jail we're clearly supposed to sympathise with him. That's necessary for the all commentary about removing his free will to work, but frankly it's hard to want anything for him beyond having him locked-up for eternity after seeing what he's done. You never stop loathing him either - especially considering how Kubrick continues to portray him in such a grotesquely theatrical way - and the result in the end is a bit of a missfire. To me it's proof of the fact that whilst Kubrick is a great visual and thematic director with a brilliant theatrical style, he just can't do characters right, and whilst that may not be a problem in all of his films, it is when characters are the primary vehicles of his narrative.
VERDICT: An all-consuming and visceral - if narrow-minded - future portrait of free will vs control, 'A Clockwork Orange' broadcasts Kubrick's brilliant directorial nouse, as well as his lack of ability to do character right.
