Limited treatment of emotional transgression

Rating: Null/10 (19 October 1999)

I'd been recommended this film by two friends who, between them, had viewed it five times in not so many weeks. One felt it might generate particularly interesting discussion between a heterosexual couple.
Well, I should say that the film sufficed to meet at least one of my expectations, the generation of a good post-filmic dialogue. But I had some reservations, conditioned by what I perceived to be a key limitation in the treatment of the film's central premise:
The film explores, partly diagnoses, the neuroses of a married couple (Kidman and Cruise) towards the prospect of betrayal and deceit, either in the reality of their social circles or the reality of their imaginations.
The premise is hardly original; yet whilst the treatment could have been more so, it sufferred from the presupposition of some decidedly unimaginative moral norms. No doubt the kind of moral norms internalised by the majority of the secularised west, even the U. S., are decidedly unimaginative; yet to see these represented on film is a passport to induced apathy.
With unimaginative ideals about what could constitute a sexual morality, and what could constitute emotional honesty, came a limited treatment of what could constitute moral and emotional transgression.