An old man's film

Rating: 4/10 (19 July 1999)

The movie, scene by scene, is often embarrassing, with blandly functional, declamatory dialogue delivered slowly, oh so slowly; the performances are exactly what you'd expect if multiple takes had squeezed the life and the will out of the actors. It's mostly shapeless, especially when Cruise seems to revisit every earlier scene in the movie to little effect; the movie is awash in a softcore art-movie cliched view of nudity; the ritualistic sex is mostly ludicrous and the climax...well, it s not much of a payoff. It s not that I can t see the things people cite as proof of the film s greatness - it s just hard to value them that highly. Certainly, there s an occasionally hypnotic ritualistic air, a feeling of heightened unreality in which the boundary between dreams and reality is untrustworthy - the movie periodically quivers under its severe vision of the weakness of the flesh; the privileged lushness of the settings heightens the fragility and shock of subversion. These undercurrents are interesting, but not enough to make the thing predominantly enjoyable. It's an old man's film; out of touch with the raw material of life (and perhaps even of dreams).