Kubrick’s final film is a droll, furtive dream of sex and infidelity, probably the weirdest film in Tom Cruise’s filmography. Loosely based on Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, it’s a film about a Manhattan doctor whose complacent beliefs about his marriage to Alice (Nicole Kidman) are shaken when she admits to having fantasized about another man. It’s a peculiar film which continues to inspire polarized opinion and close interpretation, yet it exerts a strong fascination.
Staff Pick: Nate
Kubrick’s great achievement in the film is to find and hold an odd, unsettling, sometimes erotic tone for the doctor’s strange encounters. Shooting in a grainy high-contrast style, using lots of back-lighting, underlighting and strong primary colors, setting the film at Christmas to take advantage of the holiday lights, he makes it all a little garish, like an urban sideshow. Dr. Bill is not really the protagonist but the acted-upon, careening from one situation to another, out of his depth. Kubrick pays special attention to each individual scene. He makes a deliberate choice, I think, not to roll them together into an ongoing story, but to make each one a destination—to give each encounter the intensity of a dream in which this moment is clear but it’s hard to remember where we’ve come from or guess what comes next.
Roger Ebert
Media Partner
Stanley Kubrick
Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Todd Field, Leelee Sobieski, Marie Richardson
USA/UK
1999
English
Book Tickets
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Credits
Screenwriter
Stanley Kubrick, Frederic Raphael
Cinematography
Larry Smith
Editor
Nigel Galt
Original Music
Jocelyn Pook
Production Design
Les Tomkins, Roy Walker
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