Night Life of the Gods.

Rating: 7/10 (20 March 2009)

One gets the impression that the detractors of this movie outnumber the admirers but I suspect that, if it's true, it's because the movie was directed by THE Stanley Kubrick. It's hard to top a string of hits, some of them near masterpieces. If it had been directed by some nonentity who had just graduated from film school it would have been hailed as a momentous debut.
The plot. Doctor Tom Cruise is married to Nicole Kidman and they live on Central Park West in New York. After a party they get stoned and Kidman confesses that on their vacation last year, she noticed a naval officer and couldn't get him out of her mind, not even when she and Cruise were making love and developing plans for their life together. She'd have given up her future to be with this other man just for one night.
Now these are ugly words for a husband to hear. He winds up walking the night-time streets, brooding about his wife and doubting his own grasp of things in general. He runs into a pal, a pianist, who quietly tells him that he's going to play the piano blindfolded at a secret party at a mansion. Everyone wears costumes. And he lets slip the password. He leaves, warning Cruise to forget everything he just heard.
But Cruise is still tortured by Kidman's confession, rents a costume and mask, and attends the party. He's discovered as persona non grata and, surrounded by a hundred weirdos in dark costumes and garish masks, he's told to take off all his clothes.
To make a long story short, he is "redeemed" -- ie., saved -- by a nude woman and he's allowed to leave. The next day Cruise learns that his pianist friend was hustled out of his hotel with a black eye by a couple of well-spoken hoods. And the woman who apparently volunteered to substitute her life for his is found dead of an overdose. Is it all coincidental? Cruise tells Kidman all about his overnight adventure and the two of them agree to believe that it was simply one of those things.
It's slow. Mighty slow. Nobody speaks quickly. There are long pauses between utterances while one of the conversants stands open mouthed with expectation. The plot is wispy and filled with adventitious encounters. In all these respects, and more, it's a lot different from Kubrick's earlier stuff that, by comparison, seemed to rocket along propelled by the plots. But it's an obvious culmination of certain trends in Kubrick's later work, which is to say everything after "Paths of Glory" -- the episodic structure, the looseness of consequence, the introspection.
There are, though, some interesting innovations. Kubrick had developed a habit of high key lighting. Everything was a fluorescent white in his late work, maybe with accents of color here and there, mostly apple red. There's unyielding light everywhere, as in a hospital operating room. In "2001" even the floors were translucent and lighted from below. He's reversed himself here, and it works too. It's Christmas time in New York. The streets are decorated with colored lights and interiors often have Christmas trees. The overall tone of the lighting is rosy and golden and warm all over, an ironic contrast to the disturbing goings on we witness.
And there is more comedy that we might expect. There's an encounter with an odd hotel clerk, Alan Cumming, that is right out of the Enchanted Hunters scene in "Lolita" (both novel and film). And another ludic moment in the shop of a Jewish costumier who discovers his daughter, Leelee Sobieski, in flagrant dilecto with two Japanese transvestites, beats them up and locks them away for the police. When Cruise returns the costume the next day, the two Oriental gentleman emerge with Sobieski from a back room, happy as clams, and it becomes clear that the shop owner is pimping his own daughter.
Before I run out of space -- and, believe me, this multi-layered effort deserves plenty of space -- I'll add a few asides. The piano theme that dominates the last half of the film is by a Hungarian madman, well, oddity actually, Ligeti, who built that ominous score almost entirely out of only two notes on the keyboard. It's an astonishing feat. Tom Cruise is something of an embarrassment as an actor, at least for me. I'm sure he's a nice guy and gives it everything he's got but I'm always aware that I'm watching some guy from New Jersey trying desperately to enact a role. It can't be the dialog, as elliptical as it sometimes gets, because Nicole Kidman is saddled with the same kinds of lines and she handles them smoothly. (By the way, she sports an exceedingly nubile figure in her skivvies. She's a lot sexier than the naked hookers at the party.) And it's not surprising that she's married to a doctor and lusts after an officer in the Navy. One projects immense wealth and the other power.