THE FACT HAS to be faced: Stanley Kubrick's final film is horrendous. It is, more or less, an epic waste of celluloid. Does this valedictory disaster detract from his achievement? Does it, in some way, tear it all down? The anti-Kubrickians will be quick with their autopsies. The director, in Eyes Wide Shut, seems to be trying to make the first and only intimate film of his career. He fails miserably. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have moments of interesting negotiation in the self-consciously weird marriage to which they are assigned, but Kubrick and his screenwriter have not the slightest idea how to develop their predicament. The first 15 minutes are riveting: Cruise and Kidman radiate tension and dissatisfaction. But what then? If Cruise feels betrayed by his wife's fantasies of adultery, what sort of mess can he get himself into? All that Kubrick can invent is the coldest orgy since the Nuremberg rallies.

Oh, the orgy scene: neither head nor tail can be made of it. The film dissolves into a bad postmodern European opera production, a bombastic Don Giovanni with wacky masks and naked women. The boredom is intense. Halfway through I found myself watching with a terminal yawn on my face. Nicole Kidman, strange to say, single-handedly saves the film from unwatchability: she has one or two long monologues that have a breath-saving air of reality about them. Her husband Tom has less luck, losing himself take by take in a haze of mannerisms, tics, unexplained grins, and pointless pauses. How his mouth must have hurt to have grinned that same grin through Kubrick's famous 65 or 85 or however many takes! How many Mission: Impossible sequels have been lost in the endless filming of Eyes Wide Shut! Kubrick's final, haunting masterpiece is unquestionably to have given the American viewing public a two-year vacation from the idiotic overacting monster that Cruise has become.

But it's already been known since the release of Full Metal Jacket that Kubrick is not the director he once was. The Shining was his grand finale as an Auteur: in it he jettisoned all his philosophical pretensions into a nice abyss of adolescent terror. I would happily give up all of Kubrick's previous films for the gaudy splendor of The Shining: it's the summa of his style, the ideal showcase for all his desiccated dialogues and doom-drenched long takes. It is, strange to say, his one film with true emotion in it, his one film in which human lives are vitally at stake. Eyes Wide Shut is shot through with unfortunate nostalgia for The Shining. Kubrick wants to extend those absurdist ballroom dances, those sterile back-and-forths of man and wife. But he doesn't have a story. Arthur Schnitzler is no Stephen King.

Some horrible dark angel descended on American movies round about the year 1980. That was the year after Coppola's Apocalypse Now; that was the year Kubrick released The Shining. Both directors, it now seems, gave up the ghost as Reagan came to power. They forgot how to tell stories, they forgot how to make their movies matter from the first frame to the last. But the evidence is mounting that the blame should not be placed on them. By 1980, their jobs no longer mattered; audiences, critics, and executives no longer looked to the director for leadership. Film was in the process of expiring as an art. Apocalypse Now and The Shining may have been the last great monumental commerical movies -- the last blockbusters that mattered. Eyes Wide Shut is a heartbreaking spectacle, but it is full of signs of Kubrick trying to regain the huge artistic power that was wondrously given to him and then imponderably taken away.