Eyes Wide Shut
Warner Bros., 1999
Directed by Stanley Kubrick

$$1/2

Eyes Wide Shut has one of the oddest and most memorable last lines ever. When you hear it, you won't know whether you're supposed to laugh, or be moved. The same could be said for most of what is sadly, Stanley Kubrick's final film.

The mere fact that Eyes Wide Shut is the first new work from Kubrick in twelve years and that the master filmmaker died days after completing it, makes the film worthwhile viewing. I'd like to write that the movie is a masterpiece that will somehow compensate for the loss of a great auteur, but it's not. Rather, Kubrick's final work is a flawed, engrossing, overly long statement about jealousy and desire that has moments of greatness, but never quite comes together.

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play Bill and Alice Harford, a wealthy married couple with a young daughter, living in Manhattan (amazingly and meticulously recreated on a backlot in England). Cruise is a doctor and one night they attend a party for one of his patients (Sydney Pollack). Both end-up flirting with other people. The next night, Alice confesses that she once lusted after another man, a naval officer, and thought of cheating. Bill is subsequently tormented by visions of the sailor making love to Alice.

Incensed, Cruise embarks on a night of debauchery, culminating at a strange, secret orgy where the participants all wear masks. It must be noted here that the American version of this sequence (also dubbed the Austin Powers version) has been altered with digital effects -- placing extras in front of the camera to hide our view of the graphic sex acts. The scene, which appears to have been designed as a raw, shocking plunge into a lurid world, loses all effectiveness. It's a heinous tragedy of censorship, but it's doubtful that leaving the sequence intact would have greatly changed the impact of the film as a whole.

Bill's long, strange night accounts for the main body of the movie and his perceptions of, and guilt over what happens that evening come to plague him, forcing he and Alice to make new discoveries about themselves and their marriage. But the story is too thin to give any of these discoveries dramatic weight.

The movie takes its time -- comprised of long scenes, made up of long tracking shots and long takes -- all signatures of Kubrick's style. The slow pace is in keeping with Bill and Alice's life, which is meant to be seen as rigid, routine and mundane. These are characters who long to indulge their sexual fantasies, but know that doing so would cause their world to crumble. It's that tension between reality and dreams that drives the film. But the tension never adds up to much. Much has also been made of the film's supposed eroticism; while there is plenty of beautiful flesh on display, none of the situations are particularly sexy.

Kubrick was never one to provide concrete statements in his work, or even very clear conclusions to his films. But Eyes Wide Shut lacks that one profound moment of genius that would push us to dig deeper into the rest of the film.

While many of the Kubrick touches are in place: wild moments of absurdity, an eclectic soundtrack (ranging from classical waltzes, to big band, to rock) and the heavy use of wide angle lenses to give everything a distorted, dreamy look -- the director also makes some bafflingly bad choices. Foremost in the what-was-he-thinking? category are the visions of Alice making love to the sailor. Shot in grainy black and white, the quick shots are meant to convey Bill's angst over what he sees as a betrayal, but they look too cheesy and out of place to have any effect. Other missteps include the two-note piano theme which comes off as too melodramatic, and the decision to set the climactic conversation scene inside a crowded toy store.

Watching Eyes Wide Shut, one is reminded of an aging athlete, still playing, years after he should have retired. He still has the same swing, but he can no longer knock it out of the park. In the last year, we've seen three great directors step behind the camera again after a long hiatus. All three -- first Terance Malick, then George Lucas and now, Kubrick -- seem to have been diminished by the long downtime. So these examples should stand as a lesson to all great directors: Don't take too long between films.

(c) Copyright 1999