Stanley Kubrick’s last film opens with an affluent married couple – Tom Cruise, a doctor, and his wife, Nicole Kidman  – at a Christmas Party, during which he flirts with two models (and later revives the host’s prostitute girlfriend, who has overdosed) .  Meanwhile, Kidman gets tipsy in the hands of a mysterious foreigner who does his damndest to get her away for a quickie.  The experience leads to a later conversation, during which Kidman gets stoned and cruelly informs Cruise that she once was so overcome by desire for a stranger that she would have given away everything – husband, child, life – to be with the man.  Cruise is destabilized.  Stunned, he walks the streets of New York, bouncing from sexual odyssey to sexual odyssey.

Kubrick had no business making a film about modern sexual issues.  Having read a “Vanity Fair” piece on Kubrick shortly after his death, his disconnection with his subject matter is no mystery.  He appeared to have been a semi-recluse with no social skills, much less any romantic experience.  I was reminded of the incongruity of presumably celibate Catholic priests who advise young parishioners on marital issues.  Including sex.

Cruise and Kidman are like some 1950s couple dressed in 90s clothes.  After his wife’s revelation, Cruise is menaced by the recurring image of her being ravished by the stranger, as if a wife sharing her fantasy with her husband is some great cataclysm.  Yet, Cruise is strangely immune to the manner in which Kidman mocks and taunts him with her fantasy.  Her cold and unloving manner – she roils on the floor pointing at Cruise, doing her level best to castrate him with her secret – appears to be no problem for Cruise.  Rather, it is the image of someone sleeping with his wife that drives him batty.  As for Kidman, she’s just mean and icy. 

Then there is the plot, which is non-existent, thus making for a droning, tedious ride. Cruise does his best with what he’s given, and he is particularly effective early, when he performs the minuet of explaining to his wife why he would never bed the two models. She summarily shreds his rationale.  Kidman, however, is consistently awful throughout, forced to play drunk at the party, stoned during her humiliation of Cruise, and then, in a completely over-the-top bit, frightened by a sexual dream she experienced.  She hits all the wrong chords, her drunk being sloppy, her stoner being vicious, and her post-dream persona annoyingly overwrought.   This is a performance ruined by bad choices.

Kubrick’s other forays into the pastiche of modern sexuality are laughable.  The man who would get Kidman away for a tryst at the Christmas Party is an unintentionally hilarious Hungarian.  Any minute, you expect him to say, “I vant to suck your blood.”  Prostitutes who entice Cruise from NYC streets are Kate Moss hot, with hearts of gold to boot.  The famed orgy scene is chortle inducing (everyone wears goofy yet frightening masks).  I’ve seen more effective soft core on late night Showtime.

“ARE THERE ANY SNACKS AT THIS ORGY?”

If you were not inclined to laugh at certain parts, the film is accompanied by perhaps the most distracting soundtrack ever scored – a single note piano plinking that can destroy even the most stoic.

Visually, Kubrick is painfully reliant on one trick in his bag – an endlessly repetitive floating tracking shot.  On the plus side, he does make a passable New York City out of London.   But this was a bad way to go out. 

Reese Witherspoon had to come from somewhere, so why not a high school socialite world remake of Dangerous Liaisons, with monied prep school Manhattanites in the roles of French courtesans?

The picture is neither adept enough to be engaging or camp enough to be funny. It also includes a cringe-inducing courtship between Ryan Phillipe (as Valmont) and Witherspoon. Phillipe, tasked to deflower the chaste Witherspoon (she is the daughter of the headmaster), becomes “totally infatuated” with her. Why? Because she makes him laugh. How? Because during a car ride, she made faces at him by sticking her tongue out and screwing her nose up and using her fingers on the top of her head to simulate the look of a lunatic/horned beast.

Oof.

Hollywood conceits come in many forms. In the Denzel Washington/John Lithgow film Ricochet, the screenwriter presumes he can replicate the idiom of the inner city. There is a scene with Washington, as the good black man who “made it out” and Ice T, as the bad drug lord who is still “in.” Their exchange is gussied up Shaft. The screenwriter even concluded the film with Washington saying “You can kiss my black ass!”

The screenwriter of Ricochet?

So, Hollywood’s sense of urban culture is lacking. But you’d think it would have a better handle on places closer to its heart, like suburbia. Think again. Hollywood sees the suburbs as a vast wasteland, a place for vacuity and the spawning of disgruntled screenwriters. Hollywood’s grasp on Maple and Main is no more firm than its grasp on “the ‘hood.”

Which brings me to American Beauty, a false film of suburban decay. Kevin Spacey has a midlife crisis, though it really isn’t a true midlife crisis, because he is married to Annette Bening, and she is so cartoonishly gruesome that Spacey’s crisis seems less a subject of introspection than one of survival. Bening approaches her character as Martha Stewart on methampehtamine (and that’s the joke – get it? – because Martha Stewart is so insidious). She is so outlandish that any acting out on the part of her husband and daughter seems ho hum. And then there is the tranquilized housewife neighbor, and the homophobic (or is he?) Marine neighbor, and the disaffected, let-down teens. You’ve seen it all too many times to be touched.

What is good about the film? A few things. It ends tidy. Spacey plays decidedly above the material (though, being the only empathetic character, he is difficult to judge because you beg for his return during every one of his absences).

But what is bad is really quite awful. The characters are abused rather than drawn. The use of Bening as Mothra the Suburban Scene Eating Hydra not only minimizes most character reaction, but it seems cruel.

Bening is so demonized and dehumanized – all for the illumination of Spacey – that you pity her.