Half brilliant, half horrible!

Rating: 6/10 (11 May 2004)

Stanley Kubrick's reputation of course relies upon other films, and this one is more likely to impress film students for techniques than any audiences most likely to be disappointed when they are drawn into the odd connection between Kubrick and some major movie stars more than thirty years his junior (Cruise and Kidman) who have no other connections to him. I must admit that for the first thirty minutes all I could think was "What a piece of pretentious rubbish! How could Kubrick soil himself with this?", and then it grew upon me, but not in time to convince me that Kubrick didn't make one film too many (this one) or should have made some other movie as his unintended swan song. The result is mediocrity: half masterful, and half amateurish.
As usual for Kubrick, set design is consistently masterful. Enough of this movie grates on me to damage the rest. This is not an early work of a promising filmmaker; this is the last complete work of a decayed master. Perhaps, as with the other master Hitchcock, his taste failed him as he aged. Perhaps he fell in love with a novel that he thought needed a cinematic treatment -- and bit off far more than he could chew.
Kubrick moves an expressionist novel set in Germany or Austria across an ocean and nearly a century later in New York City in the 1990s, and he gets some interesting results. Interesting, but not wholly-satisfying. Expressionism, over the top a century ago, is silly today even if recent art has gone even more over the top.
First of all, Kubrick's mastery of set design gives a beauty to an ugly story, half pornographic and half a brilliant mystery, and the opulence makes the ugliness of much of the behavior all the more troublesome. The chilly personas of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (and this is deliberate) underscore the ominous qualities of the film.
I find the short, and potentially deadly, excursion of the clinical Dr. Hartford (Cruise) into the secret (Satanist?) ceremony by overhearing a password a bit contrived. Then again, expressionism itself is obsolete because it is contrived; what was over the top then is what alienated risk-seekers search almost routinely.
Kubrick took a chance, and this one spun out of control. For good reason Expressionism did not become more than a cultural fad, dying out about twenty years after its introduction.