Kubrick is determinedly anti-erotic. "Eyes Wide Shut" follows the plot of "Traumnovelle" surprisingly closely. But it completely reverses Schnitzler's meanings. His couple comes to the realization that, even if it isn't acted upon, erotic temptation can never be banished from their lives. Finally, they are united by their acceptance of the contingencies of fidelity. Kubrick, the anti-sensualist and misanthropic moralist, relentlessly equates extramarital sex with death. After Kidman confesses to an infatuation with a young man she glimpsed a year earlier on their vacation, Cruise, his ego bruised by the confession, goes out determined to pay her back by indulging his own fantasies. He picks up a hooker (Vanessa Shaw, whose playful warmth is the only truly erotic thing -- and just about the only human thing -- in the movie) but stops short of sleeping with her. The later revelation that she's HIV-positive makes you feel you've stepped into the art-house version of an army training film.

Kubrick goes whole hog when he gets to his big orgy sequence. (As reported, the American version of this sequence has had digital figures introduced during a 65-second shot in order to obscure the copulating bodies that caused the MPAA ratings board to threaten the film with an NC-17. Apparently, it wasn't the nudity that bugged the board -- it was the movement of the couples. I'm perfectly willing to believe that the MPAA ratings board are the only people left in America who don't move when they fuck, but do they have to ruin the fun for the rest of us?) Schnitzler's erotic masquerade has become a Gregorian black mass. There are lots of naked bodies on display, but the emphasis is on the malevolent masked and hooded figures watching Cruise. On the soundtrack a piece by composer Gyvrgy Legeti hammers its way into your skull, a plunking one-note monotony that, depending on whether the pianist is hitting low notes or high ones, feels alternately like a migraine and an ice-cream headache. And Cruise has apparently been directed not to show any erotic excitement at the couplings going on around him. (I don't know of any man who could parade through roomsful of women having sex and not wind up walking like Groucho.) Like Fellini, Kubrick appears to have become a collector of grotesques, but one without Fellini's self-indulgent excess. The whole effect is rather like that of a castrated Sade, or a grandiose, po-faced version of those pornos that come along every few years and try to class things up by placing the performers in masks and feathers.

As for the much-vaunted hot sex between Tom and Nicole, there is none. If you've seen the trailer of them embracing nude before a mirror, you've seen the extent of their frolics here. The gratuitous shots of Kidman's derrière, shots that would seem unself-conscious coming from a sensualist like Philip Kaufman or an honest roue like Roger Vadim, have an embarrassed quality. Kubrick is like a guy who claims he buys Playboy for the articles peeking guiltily at the centerfold. He's too much the artiste to cop to succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh. The film's merciless, unforgiving light drains the actors' flesh of any warmth. The look of the movie is both harsh and fuzzy (Kubrick acted as his own director of photography), as if dust motes were floating before the camera.

You don't have to like Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman to feel sorry for the way they are used here. Their mistreatment has less to do with Kubrick exploiting the peek-a-boo potential of getting a look at a famous couple's sex life (that's too tabloid for his taste) than with Kubrick's seeming lack of interest in directing actors. (Why else would he permit the kind of overacting -- like Patrick Magee's in "A Clockwork Orange" and Jack Nicholson's in "The Shining" -- that has characterized his films for the last 30 years? Perhaps Sydney Pollack's own experience as a director is what allows him to give the modulated performance he does as Cruise's business colleague.) Kidman has at least gained some cachet from her work with Gus Van Sant, Jane Campion and, on stage, David Hare. But it's not hard to see why two movie stars would jump at the chance to work with Stanley Kubrick and receive the regard as serious actors that the association would confer on them. There are a few scenes near the beginning (Cruise asking Kidman where he's left his wallet or discreetly inquiring the name of their baby sitter) when the pair show the unforced rapport of married life. And Kidman has one startling moment: looking in the mirror as Cruise nuzzles her and regarding herself with an autoerotic narcissism.

But Cruise and Kidman have to play emotional extremes here without any guidance from Kubrick, and so they come off as both bland and shrill. I felt particularly bad for Cruise, who has seemed to be developing some skill in his last movies. Turning himself into an action figure in "Mission: Impossible," he was fun to watch, and he worked his tail off in "Jerry Maguire"; you got the sense he was trying to honor the script by going beyond his patented movie-star charm, trying to come up with more depth and warmth than he ever showed before. Whatever his failings, he's not lazy. He's working hard here, too, but not only has Kubrick not shaped the performance, he and Kidman are stuck with banal material. Their arguments about the differing sexual natures of men and women feel recycled from the feminist arguments of the early '70s (you know, the ones about how lust, even unacted-upon lust, was a symbol of male brutishness). The movie's whole view of the temptations of extramarital sex -- flirting at fancy parties, orgies taking place under the secret veneer of the good life -- are an anachronism. Even the AIDS-era fears of the consequences of sex feel like something 10 years out of date.

It's inevitable that any mainstream movie that attempts to deal with sex, especially one with big stars, gets touted as unprecedented. Part of that hoopla is sheer hype and part of it the childishness of how sex is still dealt with in American movies. The most shocking thing about "Eyes Wide Shut" is that despite the nudity and the orgies and the titillation of hearing Tom and Nicole talking about "fucking," its view of sex is utterly conventional. Kubrick's much-anticipated final film boils down to the most elaborate monogamy lecture ever.

Recent Stories