Well, personally I didn’t like it much, mostly because I’m not too fond of Kidman’s talent for acting… another actress might have made a big difference in really bringing home the message of the movie. Also, there was way too much female nudity, and I know there are those who try to say that sometimes nudity is necessary to the plot, but one might wonder why it’s always and only female nudity that is necessary, never male nudity. Do all plots shiver at the mere thought?
Because if nudity were really necessary, all these years, then surely there would have been many occasions where the man’s body would be shown alongside the female’s, and yet whenever there is such a scene, the man has already put clothes on, but the female is totally naked.
Why does it matter? Because I bet anyone’s heard of this movie, and anyone knows of the nudity, but I wonder how many of them actually realised there was a message in this story, and a sort of mystery too.
Nudity in a movie makes it popular, famous, remembered, but it also often takes away from the plot and from authors’ credibility.
The story:
There’s a shot of a naked Kidman, then the movie starts.
They’re dressing up to go out, he enters the bathroom while she’s on the toilet, then she takes the glasses off, they say a few words to the nanny and little Helena and go out. They’re invited to a party.
Bill and Alice dance once, then he goes mingle. She’s approached by a Hungarian man and they dance and flirt a lot.
Bill flirts with two girls then the host calls for him. Victor was having sex with a girl but she had a bad reaction to the drugs she took. Bill checks the very naked girl (in a very professional way, good) and leaves. Alice also leaves, repeating that she’s married and has to find her husband.
In their room they kiss but she doesn’t look too much into it.
Back to their life, she takes care of their daughter while he works as a doctor.
They smoke some pot and she asks him if he f*cked those two models and tells him the guy she danced with wanted to have sex with her upstairs. Bill thinks that’s very understandable because she’s beautiful, and she starts yelling at him. He says he’d never betray her because he’s in love with her, and doesn’t think about sex while he’s with his patients, and he’s not jealous because he knows she’d never be unfaithful. He also says that women don’t think of sex like men do.
She tells him that there was once when she was with Bill making love and talking about their future and she kept thinking of a man she saw that morning.
A call stops their discussion, he has to leave because someone called Lou died. He can’t stop imagining Alice with another man.
Lou’s daughter tells him she’s about to get married, then kisses him saying she loves him and wants him once. He rejects her then her fiancee arrives and he leaves.
He takes a walk and when a girl propositions him he goes to her place to have sex for money but they only kiss before a call from Alice makes him think twice about it.
He pays the girl anyway and leaves.
He’s been married nine years, their daughter is seven.
He goes to see a man he knows at work, he left medical school and is now a pianist. This Nick tells him he has to go play at another place, where he’ll be blindfolded and needs a password to get in.
Bill wants to go and see but he needs a costume and mask to get in. It’s night so he goes to a closed shop offering lots of money and gets a black cloak with a hood and a mask. He sees the young daughter of the owner with two men that she invited to have sex. This one at least is not naked, only in lingerie, quite plain as it’s usual for this movie.
He reaches a big place where there’s lots of masked people doing some ritual. Maybe a dozen women get naked, with only a thong, a mask, a collar and high heels on.
Each girl chooses a man but the girl that chooses him tells him that he doesn’t belong and should go because he’s in danger.
Walking around he sees lots of people having sex while others watch. Now all women are very very naked and she repeats that he is in great danger.
Somehow he is found out, they have him remove the mask and his clothes but the girl yells to let him go and take her.
He’s let go with threats to him and his family to never speak of this.
He is worried about the woman but has to leave. He goes home to his sleeping child and wife. He hides the costume and wakes her up because… he thought she was having a nightmare? But she was laughing… or it seemed like it.
She tells him of her dream where they were naked and terrified, but after he left to find clothes she felt wonderful, than that man she told him about laughed at her then kissed her. They had sex and then there were other people having sex, and she did it with lots of them while he watched… she hugs him now and cries while telling him this.
He searches for Nick but two men took him away from his hotel after paying his bill. He goes to pay the costume and Milich the owner now sort of offers him his daughter for money.
He goes to the place he went to last night: an old man gives him an envelope with his full name on it, and inside there is a warning to stop his inquiries.
He goes home. All the time he can’t stop thinking of Alice with other men, of what she told him.
He goes back to Domino’s place, the girl that picked him up on the street, but there’s only her roommate Sally. He starts touching her but then she’s all awkward and tells him that that morning Domino found out she’s HIV positive.
He leaves, walks and is worried he’s being followed. It does look like it.
He buys a newspaper with a big title that says Lucky to Be Alive.
He reads about Mandy, found in her room with a bad overdose. He goes to the hospital but Mandy died that afternoon.
He visits the morgue, and thinks she’s the woman who saved him at the party.
Victor calls him.
Victor says that he knows where he was last night, that he was there, saw it all, and it was him who thought about Bill and Nick knowing each other after met at his own party. Victor tells him that they put Nick on a plane back to home., and that the woman who warned him was just a hooker. He says it was all staged, all faked, they knew about him right away because he arrived in a taxi and got a receipt for the rented costume.
It was all staged to scare him. He confirms that Mandy was the girl at the party, but nobody did anything to her, Victor assures him.
Home, he sees that Alice has his mask. He cries and tells her everything.
They take their child to a toy shop since it’s almost Christmas and they talk, rather forgetting about the child there at the end. She sort of says that they should put his adventure and her dreams aside, forget about it, and move on with their life. Then the movie ends with her saying they should do one thing as soon as possible, and the last word of the film has the mood of it all: F*ck.
List of characters, cast at the end:
Dr William Harford - Tom Cruise
Alice Harford - Nicole Kidman
Victor Ziegler - Sydney Pollack
Nick Nightingale - Todd Field
Mandy - Julienne Davis
Marion - Marie Richardson
Carl - Thomas Gibson
Desk Clerk - Alan Cumming
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