And that's how Kubrick worked, taking years to complete projects, keeping them veiled in secrecy, not leaving England since he moved there in the '60s. Kubrick created a laboratory from which he issued movies that appear untouched by human hands. Except for a few of the supporting performances, nothing in "Eyes Wide Shut," which is set in Manhattan, feels like it has a connection to any recognizable notion of urban life or human behavior. The movie's Manhattan (shot, except for a few second-unit establishing shots, on sets in London) is the least populated you'll ever see. That sealed-off feeling might have had some charge if we had the sense that we'd entered a king director's fevered fantasy life.

But nothing in "Eyes Wide Shut" betrays that Kubrick had wanted for 30 years to make a film of Schnitzler's novella. It doesn't have the visionary craziness that can sometimes energize even mucked-up dream projects. And its subject -- a married couple whose jealousy of each other's sexual fantasies spurs them to pursue those fantasies -- is wildly inappropriate for the director.

To borrow an old Robin Williams line, Stanley Kubrick on sex is like Gandhi on catering. Kubrick's style and sensibility were particularly unsuited to sensuality. The filmmaker capable of the erotic tenderness of the credit sequence of "Lolita" (where we see a man's hands delicately painting a young girl's toenails) was long ago subsumed by the technician. (You sense the ghost of that tenderness in the close-ups of Leelee Sobieski as a teenage hooker. What a Lolita she would have made.)

Kubrick and his screenwriter, Frederic Raphael have transferred Schnitzler's well-heeled bourgeois couple to present-day New York, where they live in a Central Park West apartment. The central character (here called Bill Harford and played by Cruise) is still a doctor, though his wife (named Alice and played by Nicole Kidman) is now a former art gallery manager. The circles they move in are those of wealthy Manhattanites. The Christmas party that opens the movie is Kubrick's version of the slightly sinister ball the couple have just attended when the Schnitzler opens. Schnitzler is deliberately vague about the threat his couple feels at the ball; as the novella goes on that threat becomes the couples' own fear about the temptation they feel to betray their vows of fidelity. Kubrick bypasses erotic temptation to go straight for a moralistic view of bourgeois decadence. Cruise is called to attend to a young woman who's OD'd during sex while Kidman is downstairs dancing with some silver-haired Lothario who acts like the lead in a community theater production of "Dracula." The naked body of the girl Cruise cares for is presented for our delectation, as if the sight of a naked woman zonked on a speedball holds some erotic allure.

Schnitzler's "Traumnovelle" never denies the danger that's part of the allure of sex. The melodramatic conventions that dominate the story after the doctor crashes a mysterious orgy and (it's inferred) escapes with his life are Schnitzler's metaphor for the possibility that giving in to temptation will destroy you. But Schnitzler's prose was that of a dedicated sensualist and voyeur. He never denies the appeal of giving in to temptation, and the lushness of the writing makes you want to slow down and savor it even as it carries you through the story: "Fridolin's eyes roved hungrily from sensuous to slender figures, and from budding figures to figures in glorious full bloom; -- and the fact that each of these naked beauties still remained a mystery, and that from behind the masks large eyes as unfathomable as riddles sparkled out at him, transformed his indescribably strong urge to watch with an almost intolerable torment of desire."

Kubrick is determinedly anti-erotic. "Eyes Wide Shut" follows the plot of "Traumnovelle" surprisingly closely. But it completely reverses Schnitzler's meanings. His couple comes to the realization that, even if it isn't acted upon, erotic temptation can never be banished from their lives. Finally, they are united by their acceptance of the contingencies of fidelity. Kubrick, the anti-sensualist and misanthropic moralist, relentlessly equates extramarital sex with death. After Kidman confesses to an infatuation with a young man she glimpsed a year earlier on their vacation, Cruise, his ego bruised by the confession, goes out determined to pay her back by indulging his own fantasies. He picks up a hooker (Vanessa Shaw, whose playful warmth is the only truly erotic thing -- and just about the only human thing -- in the movie) but stops short of sleeping with her. The later revelation that she's HIV-positive makes you feel you've stepped into the art-house version of an army training film.

Kubrick goes whole hog when he gets to his big orgy sequence. (As reported, the American version of this sequence has had digital figures introduced during a 65-second shot in order to obscure the copulating bodies that caused the MPAA ratings board to threaten the film with an NC-17. Apparently, it wasn't the nudity that bugged the board -- it was the movement of the couples. I'm perfectly willing to believe that the MPAA ratings board are the only people left in America who don't move when they fuck, but do they have to ruin the fun for the rest of us?) Schnitzler's erotic masquerade has become a Gregorian black mass. There are lots of naked bodies on display, but the emphasis is on the malevolent masked and hooded figures watching Cruise. On the soundtrack a piece by composer Gyvrgy Legeti hammers its way into your skull, a plunking one-note monotony that, depending on whether the pianist is hitting low notes or high ones, feels alternately like a migraine and an ice-cream headache. And Cruise has apparently been directed not to show any erotic excitement at the couplings going on around him. (I don't know of any man who could parade through roomsful of women having sex and not wind up walking like Groucho.) Like Fellini, Kubrick appears to have become a collector of grotesques, but one without Fellini's self-indulgent excess. The whole effect is rather like that of a castrated Sade, or a grandiose, po-faced version of those pornos that come along every few years and try to class things up by placing the performers in masks and feathers.

As for the much-vaunted hot sex between Tom and Nicole, there is none. If you've seen the trailer of them embracing nude before a mirror, you've seen the extent of their frolics here. The gratuitous shots of Kidman's derrière, shots that would seem unself-conscious coming from a sensualist like Philip Kaufman or an honest roue like Roger Vadim, have an embarrassed quality. Kubrick is like a guy who claims he buys Playboy for the articles peeking guiltily at the centerfold. He's too much the artiste to cop to succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh. The film's merciless, unforgiving light drains the actors' flesh of any warmth. The look of the movie is both harsh and fuzzy (Kubrick acted as his own director of photography), as if dust motes were floating before the camera.

You don't have to like Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman to feel sorry for the way they are used here. Their mistreatment has less to do with Kubrick exploiting the peek-a-boo potential of getting a look at a famous couple's sex life (that's too tabloid for his taste) than with Kubrick's seeming lack of interest in directing actors. (Why else would he permit the kind of overacting -- like Patrick Magee's in "A Clockwork Orange" and Jack Nicholson's in "The Shining" -- that has characterized his films for the last 30 years? Perhaps Sydney Pollack's own experience as a director is what allows him to give the modulated performance he does as Cruise's business colleague.) Kidman has at least gained some cachet from her work with Gus Van Sant, Jane Campion and, on stage, David Hare. But it's not hard to see why two movie stars would jump at the chance to work with Stanley Kubrick and receive the regard as serious actors that the association would confer on them. There are a few scenes near the beginning (Cruise asking Kidman where he's left his wallet or discreetly inquiring the name of their baby sitter) when the pair show the unforced rapport of married life. And Kidman has one startling moment: looking in the mirror as Cruise nuzzles her and regarding herself with an autoerotic narcissism.

But Cruise and Kidman have to play emotional extremes here without any guidance from Kubrick, and so they come off as both bland and shrill. I felt particularly bad for Cruise, who has seemed to be developing some skill in his last movies. Turning himself into an action figure in "Mission: Impossible," he was fun to watch, and he worked his tail off in "Jerry Maguire"; you got the sense he was trying to honor the script by going beyond his patented movie-star charm, trying to come up with more depth and warmth than he ever showed before. Whatever his failings, he's not lazy. He's working hard here, too, but not only has Kubrick not shaped the performance, he and Kidman are stuck with banal material. Their arguments about the differing sexual natures of men and women feel recycled from the feminist arguments of the early '70s (you know, the ones about how lust, even unacted-upon lust, was a symbol of male brutishness). The movie's whole view of the temptations of extramarital sex -- flirting at fancy parties, orgies taking place under the secret veneer of the good life -- are an anachronism. Even the AIDS-era fears of the consequences of sex feel like something 10 years out of date.

It's inevitable that any mainstream movie that attempts to deal with sex, especially one with big stars, gets touted as unprecedented. Part of that hoopla is sheer hype and part of it the childishness of how sex is still dealt with in American movies. The most shocking thing about "Eyes Wide Shut" is that despite the nudity and the orgies and the titillation of hearing Tom and Nicole talking about "fucking," its view of sex is utterly conventional. Kubrick's much-anticipated final film boils down to the most elaborate monogamy lecture ever.