st. nicole kidman, tom cruise
Cruise and Kidman, Kidman and Cruise. A combination destined for the pantheon of coupled names absorbed into the lexicon of mass culture. Bogey and Bacall; Fred and Ginger; Saatchi and Saatchi. Yes, Nicole and Tom, such a lovely couple, it's a shame they can't act, as we in the Antipodes say, for shit.
Kidman spends her screen time blathering slowly like a doped out cretin, obviously continuing on her post-Blue Room art cred trajectory while hubby Cruise swings between 'brooding' and 'vacuum cleaner salesman', red highlight and green highlight in his script like so much obvious binary convention.
There is a definite sense of the character's alienation, but it's not because Cruise slips into the underbelly of sexual laissez faire, it is because he is smarmy and too high resolution despite the movie's muted colours, muted tones, underplayed plot. He is a flimsy polyester character; even the more fantastical landscapes through which he somnambulates seem more real, more concrete than he does. There is no sense of shock until the end, when (cue lights, move the camera around, now! dolly boy! action!) he cries in a rather pathetically amateur way. One friend said it best with "I would rather see a film where I believe I'm watching a character, rather than an actor, acting."
Regardless of the accumulated weight of Cruise's pop culture fame and its interference in the suspension of disbelief in a darkened room, Cruise's characterization is substandard. Can do better. Must try harder.
The talking point of the film is of course the segment where Cruise wheedles his annoying way into a sex ring (a degrading term for such a theatrical. It certainly deserves this status, being uncorrupted like some other scenes which cut with embarrassing "da-da-DUM!" music, or with a transparently formulaic intention.
Despite acrobatic acts of tantric debauchery, despite women with their kit off, despite a rather noticeable Orientalist influence, the entire thing works seamlessly. It is like watching Kubrick channel Hieronymus Bosch. Individual scenes, individually depraved, are used as notes to compose whole symphonies that somehow transcend notions of pornography into high art, along with some used purely for surrealistic humour.
Pleasure über alles; in those scenes, corruption comes secondary to that axiom.
Ultimately worth watching, but unfortunately satisfying more than magnificent.
huan-tzin goh
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