Hidden in Plain Sight

Rating: 8/10 (27 January 2015)

****SPOILERS****Stanley Kubrick's last film that he delivered the rough cut to Warner Brothers studios a week before he suddenly passed away at age 70 is filled with innuendos about secret societies that control or are controlled by those in power who really run things in the world at large. This strange world of power and control is discovered almost by accident by young doctor William Hartford, Tom Cruise, who after his wife Alice, Nicole Kidman, confessed to him in having an affair with a handsome US naval officer, who ends up doing a series of naval maneuvers on her, the year before while on vacation at Cape Cod. William who feels that he's been cheated on by his wife now wants to have a good time of his own by going out at night to the city's red light district and pick up hookers and get even with Alice for what she did to him.
With the help of his friend pianist Nick Nightingale,Todd Field, William now looking for bigger kicks and thrills then a one night stand with a hooker that are places where the kicks or fun is both hot & heavy that are far more interesting as well as exciting if he's got the balls to go to and experience them. William soon gets himself invited to this costume party in the suburbs where he's told, by Nightingale, that everyone there lets it all hang out and does their thing without any interruption from the outside world. As things soon turn out it becomes apparent to the very naive William Hartford that he's way over his head with the people he's involved in and the things he sees, if reviled, may well end up having him and his family members murdered. In fact one of the masked women at the party who tried to get him to leave later ended up dead from a drug overdose.
The film has William slowly realize that things aren't what he thinks that they are with those whom he associates and parties with like some of his friends on the outside world. It's William's good friend jet set billionaire party thrower Victor Ziegler, Sydney Pollack, who later fills in the gaps to the persons and events that William got involved with at the costume party. William earlier had saved Sydney's a** by getting a young woman who overdosed on drugs in Victor's pad emergency treatment in order to keep Victor's both name out of the papers as well as a** from ending up behind bars. It was Victor's intervention that in fact prevented the members of the secret society that William spied on from doing both him and his wife Alice in.
****SPOILERS**** In the final moments of the movie it's William, who's been going through hell for what he saw and experienced, who ends up in a state of shock in him finding out that it was his wife Alice whom he tried to get revenge on, for cheating on him, who was behind this entire scam. Broken and defeated, in seeing that he's not in charge of his life, William now meekly goes along with his wife's wishes to forget about the past and just go on with their lives as if nothing happened. Interesting but uneven film about those who really control things in the world of finance and politics as well as our individual lives. With the sad fact that it's director Stanley Kubrick didn't live long enough to edit and release his director's cut, like he did in almost all of his movies, of the film that would have smoothed things out and explained its many rough and uneven edges.