"Soshall we?"

Rating: 10/10 (1 May 2008)

I have a feeling that Kubrick's stunningly masterful visual exploration of human sexuality will be overshadowed by the major amount of nudity in it, and the graphic sex scenes. It seems that the movie is more well-known because Nicole Kidman is fully nude in it (and Tom Cruise, conspicuously, is heavily covered, even his hands, throughout), despite the fact that she was fully nude in Billy Bathgate back in 1991 but no one cares much about that. Maybe she wasn't famous enough back then. At any rate, she is nude within literally about the first 5 seconds of the film, when we meet her and her husband Dr. Bill Harford.
They have been invited to a classy dinner party which illustrates their place in society, and we meet them as they are getting ready to go out. Clearly, they live a very good life, seemingly much more than even a doctor could afford, given that they live in New York in a sizable mansion. They have been married and faithful to each other for 9 years, have a beautiful 7- year-old daughter, and a very comfortable home. Life is secure, but even in this opening scene, there is an undercurrent of something missing, almost as though they are just going through the motions of their marriage. Alice (Kidman) laments that Bill blandly tells her she looks great without even looking at her, and Bill isn't too excited about the party at all.
But the real problem with their marriage is presented in a way that only Kubrick could come up with. Cruise and Kidman are beautiful people, so it's easy to accept a classy older man being extremely direct with his interest in a romp with Alice ("then and there," as she explains later), and that two stunningly beautiful women will attempt to seduce Bill, all at about the same time. Neither is unfaithful, but this event sets off a chain reaction that leads them down an alarming road.
Later, when Alice asks Bill if he had sex with those two women (in much more colorful language than I am allowed here), he sort of laughs it off and assures her that he did not. What he doesn't notice at first is that she doesn't seem the least bit upset or worried when she asks him this, she seems blithely interested, even curious, as though part of her hopes that he did, which would allow her to form some kind of justification in her own mind about being unfaithful herself, something that she has clearly thought about. When she hears that he didn't, she's not very happy, and she lashes out at him with a story that creeps into his mind and turns his life upside down. She has always been faithful to him, but she tells him a story of something that happened that might have been even worse.
A lot of people criticize the movie for how slow it is in a sad misunderstanding of one of the movie's greatest strengths. It has a strange, dream-like quality that derives from its pacing, and this is not an accident, nor is it meant just to make the movie run as long as it is. And it is not about sex, either. This should be obvious, I think. Sex happens in the movie, but it's not about sex, but sexuality. The difference is bigger than you think. It's about the fact that humans are essentially animals with very primal physical needs, but we lift ourselves above beasts by controlling those desires and channeling them into meaningful relationships. This, the movie seems to suggest, is one of the reasons why an unfaithful spouse is such a crippling blow to someone. The most moral and sacred pact of the marriage has been broken.
More specifically, it seems to suggest a human desire (amidst both males and females) for anonymous sex, in the sequence where Bill manages to get into the mansion and witness this taking place, and the vicious threats that he receives when he is discovered. A lot of people have called this a dream sequence, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me, since it is so clearly not. It's bizarre, yes, but I didn't notice anything that would suggest very strongly that it's a dream, outside of the allowance for this possibility. It may have just been left open to that possibility to provoke discussion, but it works better as a real experience than as a dream. Later, Alice confesses a real dream, which is disturbingly close to what Bill saw at that house, and it is a tremendous blow to him.
It should be noted that the movie goes to great lengths to explore the trust in a marriage, and both parties are desperately hurt by what the other has said or done, yet neither of them were ever unfaithful to the other. The performances are phenomenal throughout, and made better by an astonishingly well-written script. You may notice, as the movies nears the end, that remarkably little actually happens in it, and yet the movie says so much. It makes a striking comment about the role of sex in a relationship, and yet never exploits it.
Sadly, a lot of moviegoers are too shortsighted or narrow-minded to understand the film, which is why you get people saying it's the worst thing that Kubrick has ever come out with. It is very normal for a person to condemn as ridiculous something that they can't understand, and this will happen with this movie. But make no mistake, the movie is brilliant, and more than a worthy addition to Kubrick's short but powerful iconography