Almost laughable....

Rating: Null/10 (12 April 2000)

I refer to the high rating this movie has received as well as certain parts of EWS itself. My wife and I looked at each other a couple of times while we chuckled at a scene, both with looks of "Was this intended to be funny?" Particularly the scenes with Cruise being attacked by a strange woman who says she is in love with him and then her fiance arrives and when he runs into the group of guys in the street who question his heterosexuality. I like Kubric films for the most part. I think Kubric may have explored the subject he was looking at in EWS in a better fashion in his adaptation of Nabokov's "Lolita." The sexual relationships, the jealousies, the overall married and non-married relationships, all were done and done better in "Lolita" than in EWS. Kidman has shown she can act. Here, however, Kubric wastes her. How well do we actually get to know her character? Hardly at all. Kidman is underused in this film, if anything. Of course, if she would have been in the film more and kept reciting her lines as if she were having trouble reading them from a cue card from a long distance, more Kidman wouldn't have been a good thing. As for Cruise, why were we subjected to constantly watching him stride down a sidewalk with just a blank, dull face we were supposed to take for thought. A voiceover would not have worked, but the supposed brooding did not work either. And as for character development, why did Kubric even include the child in the film. What use was she? The way the NY apartment the family shared was laid out, Cruise and Kidman's characters essentially lived in a separate house than their daughter (and please don't tell me that's his symbolism for the eyes wide shuttness of providing a false happly family front, if that were the case, Kubric would have, or should have, delved into the contrasts of what is presented as family and what actually exists even more).
Is this motion picture stunning in its look? In some scenes yes, some might say in more ways than one. Is it stunning in its plot? No.... c'mon how easy is it really to find a secret orgy society by happenstance (and why don't they want Cruise to join?) ... or which also houses a young prostitute pimped by her father... The scene between Cruise and Pollack is wasted also, especially since Cruise is in no real danger. That means all the buildup that he might be in danger (the young drug addict/orgy participant who warns him and later dies/his friend who suddenly leaves the hotel and town) was also wasted. At least in Kubrick's other films the danger, the suspense, the human nature and its tendencies were more fully recognized and developed. What we have here is a film that took too long to film because the director didn't know what he wanted and then died before he could correct it, thus losing the message (if there ever was one) along the way. I've read some comments here that this is a good "art" film. My question is did Kubric mean for it to be an "art" film or is that peoples' way of gracefully letting this film slide by.....