Lifestyles of the rich and bored

Rating: Null/10 (15 October 2000)

Briefly: over-long over-rated movie by an over-rated director.
More detailed comments?
We see the rich and beautiful people on toilets, getting stripped, getting dressed, and being rich and beautiful. Just as in another of Kubrick's over-rated films 2001, the director takes much too long to belabor a thin plot. Photographed in a gauzy glow, the film could be called THE NINE YEAR ITCH. It's full of style with little substance. Some of the piano music is reminiscentm of old nickelodeon meller-dramas. I got the feeling that the film was Kubrick's failed attempt at being Hitchcock.
The story takes an hour to really get started, and everything seems to be in slow motion. That's a self-indulgent method of storytelling that doesn't work here at all. Be prepared to use fast forward a lot if you don't want the film to drive you up the wall.
Oddly set at Christmas time, it could have been a good Halloween film if it had some pacing to it other than a dirge. However, there are a few enjoyable moments: the comic relief of the costume shop and the amusingly baroque masked ball.
As to the interpretation of the story as being a long dream that the sexually-starved doctor is having -- well, maybe, but unless that's clear in the original novel and one reads the novel, it's certainly not clear in the film. In fact, not much is really clear in the film. Of course, that's probably part of the theme. But I have to say it's much ado about nothing.