The massacre of an idea

Rating: 1/10 (19 July 1999)

This movie is a sad illustration of how a wonderful book and an extremely interesting idea can be massacred into a ridiculous movie. Poorly directed and artificially filled with useless, time consuming scenes, this movie also "benefits" from incredibly bad acting. I would definitely rate it R for ridiculous.
Or maybe it is me. Maybe I had too high expectancies. To be honest, I was dying to see how the complex micro-universe of the couple is seen under the magnifying glass of erotism. I expected to see two interesting characters able to redefine (sexual) happiness in their couple. I thought I would witness two sexually aware people facing the decision of holding their eyes "wide shut" and learning to live with their fantasies. All that directed by Kubrick should have been quite a treat, shouldn't it?

The only good scene of the movie, that of the orgy, is entirely copied from Fellini. All the rest of the movie is doomed to silliness and ridicule.

Nicole Kidman is unable to articulate herself in normally-paced English and almost all her scenes are absolutely ridiculous. The last scene is a masterpiece in this direction. " I... think... that... we... should... be... grateful." That takes her 5 minutes. After that, exhausted by the effort of putting into words her abysmal feelings, she utters the F word again. Which word is so much abused in this movie that it loses even its vulgarity. Everything was bad enough, but that ending was also annoying.

The movie could have ended with the scene of her sleeping with the Venetian mask and saved us from another few scenes of pathetic stupidity and poor taste. Well, we weren't that lucky.
Tom Cruise's acting was far beyond any critique. I have a hard time believing that he was aware of the fact that he was in a movie. It's pretty difficult to pick up such thing as his worst scene, but I guess he was particularly efficient in making the last scene with Victor Ziegler absolutely laughable.
Stanley Kubrick, whom I still admire for some of his films, must have died out of shame for having directed such a profligate assault to the cinematographic good taste. Or maybe, knowing that that was his last movie, he did not want us to regret him too much as an artist. Whichever it was, he was tremendously successful, at least as far as I am concerned.