On the surface, the plot is simple. Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) is a wealthy Manhattan physician with a beautiful wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), and a young daughter. After attending a lavish Christmas party hosted by a debauched patient, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), the couple returns home and shares a joint. What follows is a raw, intimate confession from Alice. She admits to a fantasy from the previous summer: a moment at a hotel where she saw a handsome naval officer and, for a split second, was prepared to abandon Bill and her daughter for a night of anonymous sex.
Furthermore, the film’s exploration of male fragility—the inability of a successful man to accept that his wife has an inner life that doesn't revolve around him—is more urgent now than in 1999.
On the surface: Tom Cruise walks through a surreal, erotic nightmare. But underneath? Kubrick’s final masterpiece asks one brutal question — “Do you really want to know everything your partner thinks?”