Marshall and the Movies

Fantastic Fest

Watch “Room 237” or any video essay about Stanley Kubrick, and you’ll come away with the impression that the preternaturally gifted filmmaker is something of an automaton. His films contain such a precision that they almost seem to evince the work of an infallible creator.

Alex Infascelli’s documentary “S Is For Stanley,” on the other hand, shows a side of the director we tend not to consider as frequently: his human side. In a kind of real-life “The Devil Wears Prada” tale, the film tells the experiences of Emilio D’Alessandro, Kubrick’s personal driver for many decades. The director plucked him from the world of race-car driving in Italy to be his personal errand boy. Over the years, he performed tasks ranging from the tedious (guaranteeing candles for three years for “Barry Lyndon”) to the discomforting (getting high on secondhand smoke from Jack Nicholson on the set of “The Shining”) to the downright fascinating (interlocuting for Kubrick in the presence of great Italian director Federico Fellini).

But Emilio’s particular set of skills come most into play when Kubrick undertook the massive project of “Eyes Wide Shut,” the multi-year production that unfortunately became the director’s last. “S Is For Stanley” at times feels like it could be a glorious DVD extra on the Criterion Collection release for that film (fingers crossed it’s eventually coming), but Infascelli avoids the kind of hagiography or star worship that normally plagues similar profiles. He simply lets Emilio tell his stories, which are bound to be fascinating for any cinephile who simply wants to share his unique view of cinema history. B /