Hit and miss

Rating: 6/10 (2 September 1999)

This movie needed more editing. I know they wanted to keep the film the way Kubrick made it, but it seems unlikely to me that he wasn't going to edit it anymore after other people actually saw it. Some of the transitions between scenes are absolutely horrible, and there is a lot of wasted space, though that likely would've stayed in the film; Kubrick always liked to plod along.
Which brings me to my second criticism of this film. At times I found it, well, boring, which seems strange, since it was billed as some kind of sex-fest; instead, there isn't that much sex in it, although in my opinion, that is probably a better thing. I also thought the scenes with LeeLee Sobieski were quite irrelevant. At most, they were amusing but added nothing to the story at all.
My fourth problem was those stupid added-in figures in the orgy scene. It's not that I need to see what they're obscuring; the problem is that the figures were extremely distracting and really stood out.

My fifth problem also relates to the orgy scene: why were most of the women so skinny? The piano player talks about how amazing the women are there, and then they turn out to be a bunch of sticks. I'm sorry, but if I can see all the bones in someone's back, even those in the lower back, bulging out, that person is too thin. And people wonder why women sometimes feel so much pressure to lose weight. In the case of the thighless woman who warns Cruise, I suppose it makes some amount of sense, because she's supposed to be a drug addict. The only thing I can figure out, other than perhaps the casting director having some serious issues relating to body image in other people, is that the sometimes twisted attendants at the orgy prefer for some reason women who are highly abnormal.
My last problem was the sometimes gratuitous use of the word f*ck. I realise that many people use that word frequently. My problem with it is that, at least among people I know, when you're talking about sex with your (potential) life partner, you don't usually use such a crude word to describe having sex with that person. Yet it is used frequently in this movie in that context. "F*ck" is a word that fits very well to Kidman's fantasy about the naval guy, but not to her having sex with Cruise. I suppose this is just my opinion, but I did have a problem with that, although it didn't affect my view of this film much.
What I DID like about this film was that the basic idea of the film should provoke discussion among couples. In perhaps a strange phenomenon, Person A knows that he or she is attracted to people other than Person B, and may even have been seriously tempted to act on such feelings, but it doesn't occur to him or her that Person B is in exactly the same situation. And sometimes it bothers Person A immensely, just like in this film. I suppose this is because we all know what goes on in our own heads, but we have to guess at what goes on in other people's; we don't know just HOW tempted they were, or if they acted on the impulse and just aren't admitting it. It seems to me that this is a subject matter that every couple needs to discuss, rather than assuming something and living in a fantasy world, until it all comes crashing down when the illusion is shattered (like in the film- all that stiff about women being "different" than men).
Warning: slight spoiler ahead. Some people, including those I saw this movie with, seem to have missed the point of the HIV+ hooker. My take on that was to show just what Cruise could have lost by acting on his jealous, untrusting, and perhaps vengeful impulses. Instead, he got lucky- not in the way one usually would with a hooker, but because his wife called him on his cell right before he did the deed. Would he have gone through with it had she not called? I would not have been sure he would, except that the next evening, he was already to get it on with hooker number 2, until she informed him of Domino's bad news. This to me is another good point of discussion: should such things count as infidelity, when a person did not commit the deed but would have if he had not been interrupted (in the first case)? And in the case of Kidman's fantasy with the naval guy: should her insistence that, had the evening gone by a little differently, she would have had sex with him, be taken as an act of infidelity on her part,or should she be given the benefit of the doubt that she wouldn't have been able to go through with it? I think it is important for both parties in a relationship to know where the line gets drawn.
I also thought that acting was, for the most part, good. I did not find Kidman's laughing fit remotely unbelievably; it was perfectly consisted with my experience, however limited, with pot smokers.
So basically, I thought this movie could have been substantially better (especially considering the number of retakes Kubrick insisted on), but it is still worth watching because it is thought provoking; it makes a person ponder both his or her own boundaries as well as those of his or her partner.