Maddeningly intriguing - it has staying power even if you don't like it

Rating: 8/10 (2 March 2013)

Like most Kubrick movies, a very unique experience whether you like it or not. My personal opinion of this movie is constantly wavering for years now. Even while I re-watch it, I find myself not liking certain aspects of it, but unable to let it go.
Cruise and Kidman, once a couple in real life, act as a couple that has reached a crisis. The crisis involves sex and the issue of sexual fantasies and their dangerous and ignored place in a marriage.
It attacks immaturity and the act of burying your head in the sand when it comes to other people's human frailties, flaws and fantasies while accepting your own. Hence the title.
Dr. William Harford (Cruise) is a typically naive young husband who thinks a woman, and especially his wife, is faithful because she requires love and stability in a relationship. He flirts at parties, seems faithful, but also seems to be oblivious to the dangers and hypocrisies of his fantasies and the way he sees women.
When he fails to show jealousy over a suave man that hits on his wife, she brutally crushes his naiveté by telling him of a time where she was willing to leave him for a fling with a sailor. Although it is an aggressive and rude confession, it's easy to overlook her admissions of fear and conflicting feelings for him, and her message to him, which she does a bad job of conveying, is clear once you think about it with mature sensitivity.
(spoilers)
He then wanders through the city, staggering with the implications and unpleasant images that this confession triggers, and is so outraged, angry and confused, that he tentatively pushes his flirtations and fantasies a few steps further. This night of strange sexual encounters is almost surreal, with people hitting on him for the strangest reasons, coming close to infidelity with a sweet hooker, all leading to the notorious cult-orgy scene.
And then comes the day-after, full of disappointing realism, daylight, and scary repercussions. He finds out how dangerous his encounters could have been. There is a death which may or may not have been caused by his naiveté. There is a plausible explanation, but is it really plausible?
The movie doesn't answer this question. It leaves us hanging with our own imaginations, like a fantasy. Instead, it is back to reality for the couple, only this time their eyes are opened to their flaws and responsibilities and possible choices.
Given the above way of looking at this movie, her last line becomes clearer. It is a crude awakening that sex is not always a romantic, or harmless fantasy, and that adults don't just make love to their wives, but *uck as well.
On the other hand, the movie may just be saying that humans are led by their animalistic drives regardless of dangerous consequences, and it's time to wake up to this fact and accept it the way it is. It doesn't explicitly raise the issue of making responsible choices. That's the kind of movie this is: Ambiguous, but thought-provoking.
It is not really an erotic movie. Kidman's nudity in the beginning of the movie is just as engineered as the rest of the movie: She starts as a sex object and a mother, gives us a strange, mysterious look in the mirror, then forcibly becomes a sexual person with flaws and immoral sexual fantasies of her own.
There was much hullabaloo over the cult-orgy scene and what it did or didn't show, but whether genitalia was shown or not is irrelevant. I found the whole scene ridiculous and mechanical until I realized that it is exactly the effect it was going for and that it needs to be taken as a surreality, and is only there to involve the audience in a fantasy experience detached from reality and a tangible eroticism, and with unexpected, unknown dangers.
Besides the ridiculous orgy, another flaw is Kubrick's ability to drain some scenes of their blood, drawn out with overly-pregnant pauses and slow pacing, possibly due to his famously pedantic multiple takes. But, in some cases, this helps the atmosphere and gives you time to absorb the scene.
This movie is a lot of things. It is an art-house movie about sex for adults. It is a horror-thriller for men in a unique sense of the genre. It is definitely a thought-provoking movie. It doesn't seem to appeal to female audiences as much as men though, but perhaps this review will help appreciate it a bit more.
I may have explained too much for a movie that wants to be open-ended and provocative. But if nothing else, I wrote this for myself to try to organize my thoughts and figure out why it glued itself to my mind so.