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When I was a kid, we had a neighbor who was pathologically jealous of his wife. Whenever a repairman or meter-reader came, this gnome would run around the 'hood screaming "Whore!" -- this despite the fact that his wife had three toddlers underfoot and looked like Jesse Ventura in drag. My father, a psychologist, explained to us that the poor guy had what was sometimes called the Othello Syndrome. Obsessive jealousy, he said, was a form of paranoia, notoriously intractable.

I must confess to finding jealousy somewhat tedious. I can't even quite warm to "Othello," which often seems like too much ado about a missing hankie. My own marriage is blessedly jealousy-free. We talk openly about finding other people attractive. Not that I'd smugly state we're forever safe from competition. But there's a difference between a hubby declaring "That Elizabeth Hurley sure has a succulent ass" and his running out to hire a hooker -- Ms. Hurley and her paramour Hugh Grant being, by the way, an alternate casting suggestion for Stanely Kubrick's excruciatingly silly, overwrought film, "Eyes Wide Shut."

Not since Jimmy Carter declared he had sinned in his heart has anyone been this punished for having a dirty thought. Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise each flirt with strangers at a party; she admits she was majorly hot for a fellow once before; and soon Cruise is spectator at a ghastly orgy that is more black mass than Playboy Bunny funfest.

Also Today Great bad sex Yes, "Eyes Wide Shut" is wooden and static. And wooden and static never looked so good. [ Health ] Tom and Nicole and Colin and Kathryn "Eyes Wide Shut" provokes literary couple Colin and Kathryn Harrison to spar over marriage, passion, jealousy and the lure of dangerous sex in a vanilla world. [ Mothers Who Think ]

Kubrick's subject is not jealousy. That's just the (thin) pretext to set Cruise cruisin', so we can get to the real subject: voyeurism. "Eyes Wide Shut" is a movie about people who like to watch. This is hardly new territory for Kubrick, who clamped his hero's eyes open in "A Clockwork Orange," or for other filmmakers -- there's Michael Powell's 1960 masterpiece, "Peeping Tom," and of course practically every Hitchcock movie sports a version of the peephole in "Psycho."

The trouble is that Kubrick does not seem to enjoy watching. The uplit nipples on his orgy gals are not tantalizing but threatening, like Phillipe Starck horn lighting fixtures -- it's almost a relief when one girl gets bumped off and Cruise studies her flopping breasts at the morgue.

The sexual energy between Kidman and Cruise is equally embalmed. So unengaged was I that I had time to wonder how they could afford that Manhattan apartment on his earnings as -- I think -- an internist (he's my favorite Doctor With Bounteous Leisure Time since Cameron Diaz in "Something About Mary"), or why they'd have a stainless steel dishwasher and oven but a white refrigerator with magnets and kid art. (This power couple, I assure you, would spring for the Sub Zero.)

The real reason married people have affairs is to escape from the kids. Nothing like becoming a parent to make you long for a night of anonymous sex far, far away from your family. Tom and Nicole have a cute red-headed 7-year-old girl, so demure and invisible that even walking with them in a toy store before Christmas she discreetly leaves her parents alone to look deep into each others' eyes and have soulful conversations: "No dream is ever just a dream. The important thing is, we're awake now, and for a long time to come." Whereas our son won't even let us get an uninterrupted sentence out about who's going to fetch the milk we forgot!

Needless to say, the roots of jealousy are Oedipal. No lover or husband could be more possessive than a small child. "Eyes Wide Shut" reeks of mother-neglect and mother-longing. As in "The Shining," the poor kid's all alone and unloved in the big, cold house while the adults overdress for their boozy parties, complete with spooky jazz right out of "Reefer Madness."

At the end, Tom and Nicole, chastened, agree to fuck and make up. The kid has noticed nothing amiss. Her homework even got done. Just a bad Manhattan night like the hallucinatory one in Scorsese's "After Hours," with one huge difference: Scorsese has a sense of humor. That's a fine quality in an artist, and indeed in a spouse.

Without humor, the best defense against the terrors of love is to make war. Kubrick's best movies have nary a woman in sight, just the chilly glitter of boys in boots, diddling their hardware. Is it not a "naval officer" whom Kidman claims she lusted after? For a control freak like Kubrick, the military makes a safer home than a marriage -- just ask Othello.

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