"Stanley Did a Bad, Bad Thing . . . "--but Critics Call it "ART"

Rating: Null/10 (18 July 1999)

Save your money or pay the $3.95 to rent the Playboy channel for a night on Pay-per-View. This 3-hour sleeper is a disappointing farce of profanity, sexism, nudity, and a half-witted script. Tom Cruise stars as the sissified but handsome, wealthy doctor who delves into a sexual underworld upon learning that his ditsy wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) has fantasized about a stranger. Alice is a former art director who is "looking for a job" and basically just says the word f- - - - and talks REALLY SLOWLY throughout the movie. Opportunities for the gritty dialog we have come to expect from Kubrick are filled with edgy music and images of Nicole putting on a black bra, pulling up stockings or baring her backside. Tom Cruise is predictable, boring, and just a bit too goody-goody to be real. Nicole is beautiful but crude, stupid and inane. She claims that men have no idea about a woman's sexual fantasies and explains (ridiculously) how she would have given up her marriage, child, and her comfortable (almost somnolent) existence in NYC to sleep with a naval officer she saw on holiday. Yet the movie says nothing about female sexuality. All women are hookers or Tom's patients or somehow disenfranchised from society. We have junkie hookers, HIV infected hookers, wanna-be hookers and 14 year-old hookers, but not one real, modern or concrete image of female sexuality. After almost two hours of Tom walking the streets of New York and passing money to everyone he ALMOST sleeps with, we get the vestiges of a thinly veiled plot. One of Tom's forays into the underworld leads him into a brothel in upstate NY, one where the idenitities of NY's elite are concealed. It is unclear whether Tom's failure to consummate his dark fantasy results in a hooker getting killed or if the hooker simply takes a drug overdose in the end. The underlying (albeit cryptic message ) is that "things are real which are real in their consequences". Was the whole brothel a masque or a charade? Is Nicole's fantasy reality or just normal desire unrealized? Is her desire as sordid as his aborted trysts with several hookers whom he kisses? By the end of the 3 hours you won't care. All the breasts and buttocks, finely sculpted and pert and shaped, look alike and all the ju-ju bees are gone. In sum, this is a disappointment for all. Kubrick is capable of far better, as we've seen in Full Metal Jacket and other films. Tom Cruise is no longer the consummate actor we see in Born on the Fourth of July or the well developed character of Jerry Maguire. And Nicole is just playing TO DIE for again with less of a dialog. I close with two thumbs down and a sardonic grin as I wait for the influx of electronic hate mail . . .