Eyes Wide Shut Review
by Stephen Evans (mprosser AT cstone DOT net)July 30th, 1999
Now Showing
Eyes Wide Shut
Dir: Stanley Kubrick. Starring Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and Sydney Pollack
Cerebral, brooding and darkly comic, Stanley Kubrick's swansong, like his greatest films, requires multiple viewings before a full appreciation begins to sink in. And that may be unfortunate, since an ambitious art film - even with two major stars - will have a hard time competing for a repeat audience during summer blockbuster season.
Worse, few movies could live up to the expectations for Eyes Wide Shut. Fueled by more than a year of rumors about the plot, nearly all of them untrue, an audience will be looking for the ultimate erotic film. This isn't it. To say Cruise and Kidman do nothing more than nibble earlobes isn't giving anything away. Rather, we're doing film fans a favor by letting them know if they've come for a hot time, they'll be disappointed. And that's not their fault. It's easy to get the wrong ideas about this picture.
Despite a teasing ad campaign from Warner Bros., this is not a movie about kinky sex featuring Hollywood's most famous married couple. Or even yawn-inducing sex.
Eyes Wide Shut is a tale of sexual obsession, with deep psychological undertones, told with the logic of a nightmare.
Cruise and Kidman are wealthy Manhattanites (although the film was shot entirely in England) with a darling seven-year-old daughter and a well-appointed apartment. As Dr. William Harford, Cruise is a man at ease in high society, overly confident with himself and his place in the world. Kidman is Alice Harford, an art curator and seemingly devoted wife whose sexual fantasies threaten the couple's complacent, insular life.
Their intimacy is established from the beginning, and not in an erotic way. The movie opens with a shot of Kidman slinking out of her black dress. Later, while her husband dresses for a Christmas party, they chat casually while she sits on the toilet, then wipes. It may be a cinematic first.
They attend a party hosted by the fabulously wealthy but decadent Victor Ziegler (Pollack), whose lifestyle provides a stunning peek inside the world of the super-rich.
The Harfords are an attractive, desirable couple. And they are not immune to temptation.
Alice dances and flirts at the party with an oily Hungarian aristocrat, while Dr. Harford soon finds two willing companions clinging to each arm. The Harfords barely rise above these attempted seductions. The doctor is about to wander off with his two bimbettes when his host sends for him. It's urgent, a servant implores.
Upstairs, a beautiful model slumps in an upholstered chair in Ziegler's bedroom.
"I think she OD'd," Ziegler says, seemingly more concerned about the impact this could have on him.
The doctor intervenes, calmly and without judgment.
"You know," Harford tells the young woman as her eyelids flutter. "You really need to get into rehab."
He rejoins Alice and they leave the party, but all the attention and a head full of champagne have put hinky ideas in her mind by the time they get home.
Back at their apartment, William and Alice relax with a joint. But something's turning in her mind. They argue about jealousy, fantasies and sexual politics. In a stunning sequence that illustrates the sudden chasm between the couple, Alice confesses she once saw a young naval officer who she would willingly have thrown away her marriage and family for a single night of sex.
The revelation shocks her husband, who is actually quite repressed and naive, unable to grasp the possibility that his wife could be unfaithful, even though it's never made explicit that she actually would. But the possibility is enough to send the doctor reeling into the New York night, where he begins an odyssey of temptation and sexual obsession, flavored with syrupy decadence. This is where the film begins to wobble, as it is difficult to believe Harford's ego is so fragile that a chance comment from his stoned wife would send him out of the house on a dark quest for...indeed. For what?
Each stop along his journey draws him, fascinated, to a deeper level of sexual deviance. Each new encounter is more perverse than the preceding event. This isn't as titillating as it sounds. Think of Scorsese's After Hours (1985), with less humor, more nudity and approximately the same weirdness quotient.
Following a chance encounter with an old college chum, now stroking the ivories at smoky, midtown jazz clubs, Harford learns of strange parties where his friend is forced to play blindfolded. But the piano player admits the blindfold once slipped and he saw garishly costumed men and mostly naked women doing, well, unspeakable things. The jazz player gives Harford the password to the party and slips away.
For a troubled soul like Harford, this provokes curiosity of a very high order. He persuades the owner of an uptown costume shop to reopen after midnight so Harford can rent a black cape and demonic
mask. After an interminably long, silent ride, a taxi drops him at the gate of a Connecticut mansion where a costumed Black Mass orgy is in full swing. This is the sequence where digital shadows and computer-generated "observers" were added to some scenes so the picture could qualify for an R rating, as opposed to the box-office poison of NC-17. That illustrates the ridiculous problems with the rating system, since it deprives adults of the chance to experience what Kubrick intended, while actually making the film more - not less - accessible to children.
Harford certainly stares with eyes wide open as his conception of the world splinters like the glass shards in a kaleidoscope.
To reveal more would be unfair.
Kubrick's stock-in-trade is metaphor and allegory. Here, he has created the cinematic equivalent of a fever dream. And that's appropriate, since the source material is Traumnovelle, or Dream Novel, by Arthur Schnitzler, a friend and student of Freud.
Stunningly photographed in the ultra-formal compositions that Kubrick favored, this is an often fascinating but flawed look at the complexities of marriage, sex and love, informed by a highly flexible notion of morality.
Eyes Wide Shut may not be the final masterpiece we would have hoped for from the late director, although in its dispassionate, darkly humorous view of humanity it is without question a Kubrick film. His imprimatur saturates every frame. And even mediocre Kubrick is more challenging than a dozen contemporary pictures, vying for audience attention at the octoplex.
Rated R for considerable nudity, sex and language.
Cinema Uprising copyright ( 1999 by Stephen B. Evans. All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, without the prior, written permission of the author.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
