A slow beginning, a beautiful middle, but a weak end

Rating: 7/10 (20 July 1999)

This movie has the feel of not having been completed. There are sub-plots that seem to have been abandoned, questions brought up in the film that go unanswered, and editing that seems sloppy in some places while brilliant in others.
Some scenes, such as the one where Cruise walks into the room with the cloaked figures in a circle, seem vintage Kubrick. He captures a surreal view with perfect timing. Other scenes, though, seem poorly shot. The scene in which Kidman starts laughing and drops to the floor, then lays face down on the floor, then sets upright, then lays down again seems markedly ill shot. The camera is in for a close shot on her and follows her down to the floor, it then jerks back up when she sits up, and then follows her back to the floor again. This seems poor camera work. If she is going to flop up and down, the camera should have made a wide shot. If the scene called for a close up, it should have had a cut to Cruise interspersed to avoid having to jerk the camera down, up, and back down again. This was a bad enough shooting sequence that it stood out disturbingly in an otherwise excellent scene. I have seen amateurs with video cameras follow movement more smoothly.
The editing also seemed rushed. Several scenes seem to have the film footage of one scene just spliced right on to the end of the footage of the previous scene with no transition footage at all. This may be all right for music videos, but I would expect better editing in a feature film.
There are also several subplots that are introduced, developed, then simply dropped. Kidman's dance partner in the party segment has a lot of screen time invested in him with a commiserate interest by the viewer. What happened? This was far too much time to just set up Kidman's view on fidelity. The viewer expects something of this to come back, but nothing ever does. Cruise's pianist friend's fate is never disclosed. A simple call to the West coast would discover if he was sent home, murdered, disappeared, or something. Admittedly he was a minor character, but the audience has some time and interest invested in him and it would like to know his fate. Kubrick doesn't always give answers, but he does give enough information for the viewer to deduce what is going on. Not this time, though. The same could be said of the dead woman from the party. Murder, suicide, accident? Cruise's character is a doctor, it shouldn't be that hard to look for forensic evidence to discover the truth. But the movie is silent on this matter.
I have seen nearly all of Kubrick's movies, most of them several times, and this is by far the worst edited and constructed of them all. The subject matter may be in the mind of the characters and actual factual matters don't matter, but it is still disconcerting to the viewer. My personal opinion of this film is that Kubrick himself never finished it. The editing and scene selection seemed very inconsistent with any thing he had done before. The story line seems unfinished with loose ends dangling through out. I think what we have is three fourths of a Kubrick film and one fourth of something else. The recognizable Kubrick parts are brilliant in places, the rest is not.