A BLANK STARE
EYES WIDE SHUT
Kubrick's final film leaves many unanswered questions.
With Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack
Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederick Raphael
Based on the novel by Arthur Schnitzler
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Stanley Kubrick was not as reclusive as his reputation alleged. He didn't hide from people: Rather, he made people come to visit him, and he spent long hours talking with friends on the telephone. That was how he kept in touch with the world.
Never has this isolation been more manifest than in Eyes Wide Shut, which he began to make about two years ago and finished just weeks before his death on March 7. Kubrick had wanted to make a film of Dream Story, the 1926 novel by Arthu r Schnitzler, a Viennese physician-turned-writer, since at least the early 1970s. So he had ample time to think about it, and that's what comes across in Eyes Wide Shut: A thought process, which naturally lacks the excitement you need from a drama about marriage, love and sexual depravity.
This subject matter might have held more resonance a few decades ago, when our sexual mores began to undergo a painful mutation. But nowadays it's fodder for TV movies and talk shows where people throw chairs at each other. Yet here Kubrick is, presenting it with the heaviness of a psychoanalytic moralist and only slightly - and rather self-consciously - adapting it for the times.
Eyes Wide Shut revolves around 48 hours in the life of an upscale couple who live in an elegant apartment on Central Park West. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) is a doctor specializing in diseases of the rich. His wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) managed an art gallery until it went out of business. They have a darling red-haired daughter, and on the evening we meet them, they're dressing to attend a party at the home of Victor (Sydney Pollack), one of Bill's wealthiest clients.
At the party, two beautiful models surround Bill and link arms with him. He flirts effortlessly until Victor summons him to an upstairs bedroom to revive the drug-addled hooker whom Victor has just finished fucking. Meanwhile, on the dance floor, a tipsy Alice dances with a cavalier Hungarian whose tongue is as silver as his hair.
Later that night, excited by their would-be seducers, the Harfords make love, presumably with a passion they haven't experienced in a long while. I say "presumably" because the brief TV clips you've been seeing for months of the naked Cruise and Kidman ar e all you see in the movie. This is Kubrick's first mistake: He needs a long scene here to establish a level of passion between his lovers, so we can weigh it against the temptations that follow.
The next night, we're in the bedroom again with Bill and Alice. They smoke marijuana, and Alice gets aggressive. She talks about a glance she exchanged with a Navy boy on a recent vacation and confesses that she wanted to make love to him. But she also sa ys her sexual fantasy has made her love Bill more than ever. Bill listens as she weeps out her guilt. He glowers and scowls. He answers his cell phone.
A patient of his has died, so he feels the need to make a courtesy call to the home - and also to get away form Alice. Thus begins a long night of near-sex encounters for Bill: With the daughter of the deceased, with a beneficent hooker, and finally, at a bizarre costume party sex orgy held in a mansion and attended by people so powerful and important that they enter with a password and hide behind masks.
More things happen before Bill and Alice have their reckoning, which Kubrick and his co-writer, the novelist Frederick Raphael, lift verbatim from Schnitzler - except for one exchange at the end, which is Kubrick's ham-handed way of contemporizing the boo k. He adds a few other '90s touches throughout, as well as a scene between Bill and Victor that "explains" the party at the mansion.
These are bad choices, not because they break faith with Schnitzler, but rather because they deaden the somnambulistic creepiness of his film. In the world of Eyes Wide Shut, men control the sexual reigns and women either do what they're told or have the sense not to take part at all. Alice commits sins of the mind; Bill's sins are more of the flesh. So Kubrick ultimately gives women more credit when it comes to being faithful: He seems to know that people can control their actions but not their thoughts - although Bill, in his desperation to get laid by *anyone* other than his wife, doesn't see the distinction.
There's never a palpable sense in Eyes Wide Shut of the sickening feeling you get when you imagine your lover with someone else. In the family scenes with the Harfords, Kubrick bludgeons you with the clichés of mundane conversation, as if he's ju st discovered the banality of modern life. You might argue that Eyes Wide Shut intrigues us to heed the consequences of the past quarter century of living in our lurid, self-absorbed daydream (hence the title - both Kubrick's and Schnitzler's). B ut even that reading doesn't get you very much: Kubrick directs the movie with his trademark formal touch, and this times it leaves you cold.
This all adds up to the weakest film in Kubrick's canon - a work that may be discussed more for its puzzling miscalculations than for its wanting complexity. Cruise is lean and effective when he's tense or angry; Kidman is lightweight but builds her confe ssional scenes well. The actors all function as required, and where Eyes Wide Shut might have been stronger with different stars, acting doesn't matter much this time in Kubrick's elegant melange of lighting, visual style and set design.
Eyes Wide Shut has an arresting look, with evocative images and camera movements that summon A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. He opens and closes with a Shostakovich waltz, as if to captures a bit of the old Vienna, and acce nts much of the action with wan, dissonant piano notes and chords. Kubrick filmed Eyes Wide Shut in England, where he's lived since the early 1960s, and his storytelling is seductive enough that his eerie faux-Manhattan streets won't distract you - except perhaps for that one U.S. mailbox prop, marked with white graffiti spray paint, that keeps popping up on every street corner.
Thematically, Eyes Wide Shut is rudimentary Kubrick - a story of duplicity and chaos beneath a tranquil surface. "It was only when he reached the front steps," wrote Schnitzler in his novel, "that he realized that all this order, this regularity , all the security of his existence, was nothing but deception and delusion." That sums up the oeuvre of Stanley Kubrick and explains why he so esteemed this book, although we'll never know why he couldn't breathe some life into it.