Feverish sexual dream

Rating: Null/10 (24 December 2011)

Just to be clear at the outset, Kubrick was a great engineer of visual dynamics, an architectural mind above all, but not a very deep thinker.
On a first round through cinema, he really seems to validate his name as one of the most impressive directors; every encounter seems to be a daunting prospect exploring some unprecedented way of seeing things, and those that don't make you feel like it's your fault.
On the second round however, you begin to notice things; how a lot of innovation that is attributed to him is really Antonioni's, how his metaphors usually mirrored one way and then only as you see them, how his perceived coldness was only a way of blocking things, the application of some aesthetic of ideal beauty, how his most profound visual gestures amounted to little more than operatic platitudes.
His films were not so much centered in shared life then, breath from soul, they were merely different ways of tinkering with the medium and how it could play out. Each new subject matter was only an opportunity to apply the colors in a different way. Ritual without ecstacy. Great visual sex but only rarely with some flame. Except this, this one tried.
This was meant to be about a shared life that we knew about and shared in from every tabloid headline, a public life that referenced cinematic dreams. It was meant to be about us wanting to see Tom and Nicole, intimate, vulnerable, human. It was a big thing at the time, foolish peeping toms that we are. We expected sex, and sex as the cracks in the porcelain mirror. Kubrick of course knew in advance and duly obliged us, the first shot being that of a buck naked Kidman. And both of them break down at some point, tattering the beautiful image we knew.
So at first glance we may concede that we got what we came for and more, interestingly consummated outside the bedroom as a feverish dream about sex with all the nervous anticipation and none of the actual sex, and so that the project was successful.
To some degree it is. The tabloids may be old news now but it's still the most interesting angle Kubrick ever worked from; a dreamy film couple playing a film couple but with some nightmare between them that was secretly fantasized about. We savour the game of deception, but of course the burning question remains; how much of it true and how much our own lurid fantasy along with the man?
The point of course is that we're not supposed to know, and be as confounded as they are at the end in how lust obscures their real world. Was her dream a lie masking the real thing? Was his reality one long wandering nightmare about guilt and shame stirred from restless sleep?
Since it's the whole point that the lines between waking world and sleep are blurred, what matters is the connection, how these two interject into each other's mind. Kubrick posits this to be a portentous metaphysical wiring; his sudden absence at the party that gives him the brunt of the blame as though he was vicariously consummating by covering up for what himself had in mind; as soon as she reveals her sexual fantasy back home, the phone rings to announce a death; later in the hooker's apartment, another sexual fantasy is interrupted by another phone call; or the finale of the famous orgy scene, where he bares himself for inquisitive, judgmental eyes.
(Kubrick is careful to avoid suggesting this is about female sexual abuse, we see homosexual pairs dancing together, one male, the other female).
This would be potent stuff that could have gone a long way to alleviate the horribly ostentatious acting, truly atrocious by everyone involved, and dear lord if that gay waiter is not a surefire sign of senility, the clunky dialogue, the pomp verging on flamboyant camp of the whole thing.
But that still leaves those last two scenes, with Sydney Pollack in the billiards room and later in the shopping mall. Every little nuance that we might have teased out for ambiguity is spelled out for us, that it's meant to be ambiguous, and that dreams may be real and vice versa, as though it was truly important stuff that we couldn't afford to miss. Every.little.nuance, there, with meaningful pauses between them, and Tom Cruise clutching his head like he's trying to shake loose some desperate emotion. It is woeful stuff to see from Kubrick.
We're left with a director who seems to have spent his last 12 years watching Lynch, and only applied garish colors on what he thinks it's all about. An embarrassing way to end a career, which is even more of a pity considering how he kept this for himself and gave away AI to Spielberg.