Movie spotlight: 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Updated: July 24, 2008 - 7:18 PM

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Lust and marriage: In the 1999 movie "Eyes Wide Shut," a married couple (played by Tom Cruise, left, and Nicole Kidman, right) are obsessed with sex. Handout photo courtesy of Warner Bros.

Photo: Feed Loader, Warner Bros

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'EYES WIDE SHUT'

Trust Stanley Kubrick to make a sex movie with absolutely no sexual heat but instead with ideas that haunt you. Weird, kinky, depraved and unsettling, "Eyes Wide Shut" (★★★★, rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language and some drug-related material) was the master filmmaker's final film, a testament to the power of desire and fear. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play an affluent Manhattan couple who, after years of marriage, have become enigmas to each other. Boredom, discontent and illicit desire have begun to seep through their lives like slow-working acid. Her confession of a sexual fantasy shocks him, and he wanders New York's erotic underworld all night long, a tantalized tourist through a world of temptations he scarcely noticed before. He's haunted by visions of his wife in another man's arms, and a bit at a time, his moral foundations deteriorate. The screenplay, by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael ("Darling"), demands -- and rewards -- close attention. The password to a dangerous orgy at a private estate is "Fidelio." That's the Beethoven opera in which the heroine saves her beloved from execution, foreshadowing events that follow in the film. "Eyes Wide Shut" is beautifully cast, exploiting the public curiosity about Cruise and Kidman's married life, and attention is lavished on every supporting role. The late Sydney Pollack is bluff and gregarious as a libertine tycoon; Rade Sherbedgia makes a funny/creepy impression as a costumer with unsavory plans for his Lolita-like daughter, and Alan Cumming does a great comic turn as a hotel clerk who's quite taken with Cruise. (Midnight Sat. $8.75. Uptown Theatre, 2906 Hennepin Av. S., Mpls. 612-825-6006.)

COLIN COVERT