You find out ... or do you?

Rating: 10/10 (25 June 2017)

I saw this again recently (two years ago) and I totally got into the weird tone, the razor's edge that this guy's walking, and how he doesn't seem to get good answers for what's going on, ultimately ... what he's told is not just cryptic or obscure, or to mollify him, they're the sorts of things you'd tell somebody who doesn't deserve to know, when you've got answers aplenty and can spare these minor-and-prosaic ones. Everything's all wrapped up and accounted for a few times over, so, why behave as though there's some "whole enchilada" to even share with him, to begin with? He's only glimpsed a piece, if that All these alternate identities have to do with cover, with not getting caught out, with the possibility of discovery buried under many onion skin-layers of guise to conceal the goings-on ... what else could be the point? Why unravel it?
It's crucial that the piano-player guy only knows a *little*, and then the physician played by Tom Cruise sneaks in, driven by some sense of dislocation at home which pushes him over the line to take some potentially-unwise risks. Everything the Sydney Pollack character tells the Tom Cruise guy near the end *seems* to account for everything, and you'd be paranoid to worry more about having it all wrapped up like that ... right? It's a weird distinction; it's not that everyone on screen is simply "rich," it's that those other people are "wealthy," and the doctor is merely upper-middle-class. (Remember, the Fitzgerald line is actually "the *very* rich are not like you and me.") He's close enough to have contact with them, but he's not in the "inner circle," and, whatever they might think of him personally, he's not going to get clued in, he's only going to be placated. (They also can't just "get rid" of the guy, that's out of the question -- which is why the drama proceeds the way it does. It's not a "kill him if he's giving us problems!" fictional-fallacy story.)
Part of the problem with catching this lies not just in subtleties not easily explicated without wrecking the whole movie to begin with, but in the use of recognizable stars whom we're accustomed to sitting back and watching do things we wouldn't, anyway. (On the other hand, if Tom Cruise was playing a working- class steelworker, for example, and Sydney Pollack was a champagne-sipping bigwig, we'd know how to take it, but it's not so drastic and pedantically-obvious a distinction in this particular movie -- which is also why the only-in-NYC setting is crucial). Similarly, the narrative strategy of the movie involves putting you in a position whereby catching the tone and usage of "privileged information" as deployed between individuals in offhand conversation proves crucial to understanding the action, as well as how much one could guess about what goes on behind closed doors when they're decisively shut tight, quiet as a tomb, emitting no sound from those trapped inside. (I didn't get this as a 28-year-old in '99 when I first saw it in the theater, and the reviews I encountered didn't help.)
As a result, I thought the masked-ball scene was really, really scary; Kubrick's use of the music, or, rather, his invoking of how ritualistic occasions would *deploy* specific musical tones towards ends like that, stirring up all the deeper energies of the participants, smacked of esoteric practices that only few people walking the earth would even know *about*. To be not nervous by that point is to be less-than- clear about how hot the water the Tom Cruise guy is in. What is this place he has just waltzed into out of some vague curiosity and momentary spite towards his wife? I think the movie comes together or falls apart, by that point, for viewers if they're not with him, if they can't sense he's walking a tightrope, little though he may be aware of it at the time ...