“Eyes Wide Shut”

The much talked about opening shot of Stanley Kubrick’s 13th and final feature film, “Eyes Wide Shut,” encapsulates the film’s major themes in their entirety:

With her back to the camera, Nicole Kidman slinks out of a glimmering black dress, her shoulders curling and dress dropping to expose the long, lean curves of her naked body.

In a film that explores the ramifications of desire, fantasy, lust and sex within the tight confines of a monogamous relationship, it’s an important moment that immediately implicates the audience: Indeed, Kubrick knew that Kidman’s naked body would not only spark quiet lust, desire and sexual fantasy among some of the men in attendance, but also jealousy in their partners if those fantasies were revealed.

“Eyes Wide Shut” is a film about how sexual fantasies, when revealed, have the power to forever alter relationships. It understands that a measure of illusion is necessary to keep even the best relationships afloat, and that when those illusions are threatened, such as with the truth, the core of those relationships can be hurled into a tailspin.

The film, structured as a thriller, stars Kidman and her husband, Tom Cruise, two stars with enough pull to lift this cerebral, languorous, yet multi-layered and absolutely adult film out of a cinematic mainstream teaming with teen angst, sexual uncertainty and dirty jokes.

Its selling point is sex, but unlike many recent commercial films, it never trivializes sex because the cynical and emotionally removed Kubrick wisely understands and respects the ramifications, dangers and importance of sex. That this is Kubrick’s most personal work is no surprise given its subject matter — there is nothing more personal than sex.

In brief, the plot: When Alice Hartford (Kidman) and her husband, Bill (Cruise), get high on pot, Alice shares with Bill a sexual fantasy she once had that involved her and a young naval officer she saw while vacationing with Bill in Cape Cod. “I was ready to give up everything for him,” she says to her husband of nine years. “Everything.”

After a fight, Bill, a wealthy Manhattan doctor, takes to the streets, his mind whirling with black-and-white images of Alice having sex with the naval officer. But there is nothing black-and-white about sex or Kubrick’s vision — he soon sends Bill on a sexual reawakening couched in something of a dream. As Bill’s jealously fuels his sexual desires — he goes home with prostitutes and lies his way into a swanky masked orgy — Kubrick saturates his film with the primary colors of Christmas, a motif carried throughout that effectively blurs the line between fantasy and reality.

The film’s turning point is its orgy, which has been ruined by the ridiculous demands of the MPAA ratings system. Instead of seeing Bill’s desires come to life in a mass of copulating bodies, and instead of being allowed to feel what he must have felt when his unspoken fantasies are suddenly there before him, the impact is forever lost because the sex is obscured with digitally generated figures.

As it appears now, the scene is only slightly more risque than an episode of “Melrose Place.” With Kubrick’s vision compromised in the studio’s effort to win the film an R rating, the film feels as if it has come decades too late — indeed, there is nothing in this orgy to stir audiences as Kubrick intended, which robs the film of some of its emotional impact.

Of course, not all of the film’s problems can be attributed to the MPAA — the film is pointlessly too long, which is Kubrick’s doing. Worse are the thin, uneven performances from Kidman and Cruise, but even that isn’t entirely their fault. In his quest for cinematic perfection, Kubrick demanded — and got — his actors to reshoot each scene dozens of times, and it shows. There is a rigidity to their performances that may not have been there had Kubrick entertained a looser vision and trusted his stars to act, at least in part, from their souls.

In the end, these are mere quibbles; “Eyes Wide Shut” works on so many levels, it demands several viewings to fully appreciate the great mind working behind it. Stanley Kubrick had a respect for film as an art form that is missing in today’s films — he was an intellectual with an eye forever cast toward the commercial. That the bedroom was his final comment on the world seems fitting. Who better than Kubrick to help us understand one of the greatest mysteries of all?

Grade: B+

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His film reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS. Each Thursday on WLBZ’s “NewsCenter 5:30 Today” and “NewsCenter Tonight,” he appears in The Video Corner.