Brains Wide Shut more like

Rating: Null/10 (15 October 2000)

After spending what seems like half a lifetime last night watching this endless film, I'm left with feelings of sympathy for Tom and Nicole. Fancy giving up nearly two years of your lives to make such a desperately flawed movie. I've read quite a few of the reviews to figure out if anybody else had any clues as to what it was about. The prevailing opinions are either that you are in some sort of intellectual class above anybody else, and that you get it and the plebes don't, or that it's beautifully filmed schlock. I'm of the second opinion. I get the premise that it's about how fragile relationships are, and that we have to trust each other, but did we have to sit through nearly three hours to make that point. Another problem I have with it is the mannered acting from just about everybody in it (ACTING !!! as John Lovitz would say). Nicole's portrayal of being stoned was over the top, maybe having to repeat the scene time after time for Kubrick had that effect. Every line seemed to take forever. I can't think of anybody in the film who came across as natural, apart from the nymphomaniac daughter of the Russian costume-store manager. The film really started to go down hill in the very first scenes where Nicole at first played along with, then rejected the advances of an ageing Hungarian lounge-lizard at a party. Why would she put up with his tawdry come-on lines? It doesn't ring true at all. As to the so-called orgy scene, everybody looked bored stiff - no pun intended; the women walked about in slow motion, was this supposed to enhance the eroticism? And by the way, do these people have X-Ray vision? How could they possibly know that Cruise was an outsider behind his mask? Any tension Kubrick was trying to inject into the later part of the film was ruined by the incessant plonking on the piano that any toddler could manage. More quibbles: London cannot pass for Manhattan, the streets were much too tidy looking. Also I saw the same mail-box in several different locations, tagged with the same graffitti. I 495 does not go anywhere near Long Island, as far as I am aware - it's in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Maybe that mansion they were at was really in Newport R.I. in which case the film becomes even more unbelievable. The commute would be horrendous! These may seem nit-picking, but look at it this way: either Kubrick is a perfectionist genius, in which case he would have got those kinds of details right, or he's a human being who made some excellent films earlier in life, but unfortunately his final film was not up to his best.