FINAL CURTAIN : Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'.

Not every great artist brings his career to a splendid close. How could they, when few know they're on the way out? (Even the eighty-year-old Verdi considered capping the enchantment of Falstaff with a stormy Lear.) So let's not mince words about Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick's swan song turns out to be a squawk. Still, that sound came out of a creature unmistakably a swan. Unlike some other aging titans (I'm thinking of George Stevens and John Ford) whose last efforts were indistinguishable from the work of hacks, Kubrick never completely lost his touch. But that touch turned into a death grip.

For once, the blame can't be loaded onto the original story or even the screenplay derived from it. Traumnovelle (Dream Story) may not show Arthur Schnitzler in peak form, but it is a compelling psychological study of a husband discombobulated by irrational jealousy. This young doctor realizes that his wife hasn't been unfaithful to him and almost certainly won't be, but her mere daydream of infidelity, with its disclosure of unanticipated erotic depths, proves enough to spur him into the darkness of nocturnal Vienna. His adventures there include a declaration of love from a dead patient's daughter right beside the deathbed; an unconsummated encounter with a prostitute; a Kafkaesque visit to a costumer literally moonlighting as a pimp; and, climactically, his infiltration of a club of upper-class orgiasts from whose clutches he escapes only through the intercession of a masked beauty (an aristocrat? a courtesan?) declaring herself "ready to redeem him" (with her life? with her sexual abasement?). Although these events are ostensibly real, the hero's consciousness is so exacerbated by jealousy and danger that everything is experienced as delirium. In the cold light of day, he tries to retrace his steps only to discover that his savior may have met a nasty end. Back in his wife's arms and privy to more of her fantasies, the doctor learns to appreciate what is dependable in marriage and to accept what is not.

The dialogue in Frederick Raphael's screenplay, which transposes the action from turn-of-the-century Vienna to contemporary New York, may be trying to echo the psychological waverings of Dr. Bill Harford, but does that excuse all the clunky repetitions? Prostitute: "Come inside with me." Bill: "Come inside with you?" And, once inside, Bill: "What do you recommend?" Prostitute: "What do I recommend?" Is this conversation or a Berlitz lesson? Nevertheless, Raphael has laid out the action in just the way Kubrick always favored, in lengthy, slowly building scenes, and his substitutions of New York's locales and conventions for Vienna's mostly made sense to me. (Reviewers have complained that no modern husband would be shocked by his wife's sex fantasies, but Raphael makes it clear that Harford is devastated that his wife was ready to dump her marriage and abandon her child to realize a fantasy. The anxiety this might evoke is universal.) There is a solid and exciting story here, but Kubrick's idiosyncrasies, once the trappings of an original sensibility, have hypertrophied to the point where they damage his storytelling.

In Kubrick's films, conversations rarely begin in medias res. Rather, he prefers to show the entire arc of encounter: the meeting, the slow engagement or opposition of interests, the complication of tensions, an emotional explosion (or avoidance of it), a simmering down, a definite period. Think of the lacerating Humbert Humbert-Lolita quarrels in his Nabokov adaptation or the smarmy mutual manipulations of Alex the droog and the government minister at the conclusion of A Clockwork Orange.

The same method prevails here, but Kubrick seems to have lost his sense of proportion. When the pathetic Marion's declaration of love to the doctor is cut off by her fiance's arrival, why do we have to watch the newcomer enter the foyer of the townhouse and walk all the way down a long hall to the sickroom? Wouldn't a sense of frustration be better conveyed by the camera staying in the room and a knock on the door interrupting Marion's plea? When Bill, trying to locate a missing friend, interviews a waitress, why does this strictly informational scene take two minutes to play out when a twenty-second chat would have done the trick? In the face-off between Bill and a millionaire who holds the key to the mystery, why is there so much conversational bric- a-brac about shooting pool and appreciating good scotch (delivered amidst some maddeningly fidgety staging) before we get to the matter at hand? If all the fumbling was meant to increase suspense, it doesn't. This laboriousness kills the story's climax. Bill enters his bedroom and sees the face of a man on the pillow beside his sleeping wife, Alice. He comes closer and realizes that the face is a mask, the very mask he wore to the orgy. The shock and its instant relief lance his jealousy and reduce him to tears and confession. To feel what he's feeling, we must see the mask precisely when Bill sees it and from his point of view. But Kubrick shows us the mask seconds before his hero enters the room, thus dispelling the illusion, diffusing the shock, and impeding the emotional meaning of the scene.

The failure of the climactic scene relates to the movie's overall failure: its lack of inwardness. Schnitzler's material cries out for a treatment in which realism quickly yields to a dreamlike subjectivity. Kubrick has a nice feel for the romance-menace of New York after hours (surprising in an expatriate who hadn't lived in his home town for thirty-five years), but he sets many scenes so coldly before us that we're too aware of elaborately designed sets and carefully choreographed camera movement instead of the turmoil in the hero's mind. Case in point: the orgy, which should evoke a Walpurgis Night, resembles nothing as much as one of those Eurotrash movies of the early seventies, such as Emmanuelle and its progeny. Granted, the orgy's participants may be wealthy middlebrows who spent half their adolescence watching Emmanuelle and reading The Story of O, but we should be experiencing the orgy as Bill does, as temptation and menace and spiteful payback to his wife.

You can always tell when Tom Cruise has been miscast: his bucktoothed stare makes him look like Bugs Bunny. Cruise is good in any role that requires old-fashioned, all-American salesmanship and macho elan, as in Rain Man and Jerry McGuire. Trying to convey a sensitive man's complex doubts, he's in over his head. Nicole Kidman's failure is mitigated by some good notes she hits in a monologue late in the story, but she gets the crucial early scene of sexual confession wrong. Both Schnitzler and Raphael make it clear that Alice is upset by her husband's complacent confidence in her faithfulness and his underestimation of her sexuality. But Kidman so overdoes Alice's bitchiness that she seems to be reproaching her husband for being faithful, which isn't her character's intent at all.

In all his films after A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick selected and directed his supporting casts with greater care than his stars, and that remains the case here. Though Sydney Pollock vainly churns away at the role of the piggish millionaire, Rade Sherbedaia is delightfully slimy as a pimp and Leelee Sobieski is haunting as his underaged bait. The noted British actor Alan Cumming has a field day spicing a gay desk clerk's matter-of-fact dialogue with unspoken innuendo, while Marie Richardson, giving the only poignant performance, makes Marion quite the most interesting character in the movie.

I think of Kubrick's first commercial film, Killer's Kiss. (His previous Fear and Desire was apprentice work, scarcely seen at all.) This gangster movie is nothing but an exercise in moviemaking-Kubrick teaching himself to shoot a boxing match, then a love scene, then a chase, and so forth. As on-the-job training it's successful, but it's not a work of art. Now, forty-five years later, with a lifetime spent making one truly affecting, disturbing film after another, Kubrick has left us a strange memento: another technical exercise, photographed in that slightly veiled style he favored (with a wonderful strawberry- blonde tint for the early party scenes), streaked with his usual sardonicism, studded with funny supporting performances that abet that sardonicism, and underlined with music shrewdly excerpted from already composed pieces. Forty-five years of experience and a bigger budget make a difference: Eyes Wide Shut is more imposing than Killer's Kiss. But not enough of a difference. Neither Kubrick's first film nor his last is a work of art. We must honor everything that came between.