Eyes Wide Shut

Getting back to the films of 1999, I turn to one of the most controversial, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which was his last film. I've seen it three times now and I'm still not sure whether I like it or not. I'm certainly fascinated by it.

Kubrick, with all of his films, delved into a genre, and Eyes Wide Shut was his movie about sex. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who were married at the time, play a couple here. They go to a party and each flirt with others, and then Kidman reveals to him that she once had a fantasy about a Naval officer. Jolted, he spends an evening wandering the city, basically with blue balls, finally ending up at a mansion on Long Island where a secret society holds orgies. He never does get laid, though, and confesses everything to Kidman, who in the last line of the film suggest they fuck.

The script for Eyes Wide Shut, by Kubrick and Frederick Raphael, really is one for a porn film, but with all the sex cut out. The very first image is of Kidman, nude, from behind, just to get that out of the way. All along the way are aborted sexual encounters--at the party she is aggressively seduced by a Hungarian dandy, while two models are leading Cruise off to room for a menage a trois. Cruise ends at the home of a deceased patient, whose daughter confesses her love for him, then in the apartment of a hooker (Vinessa Shaw), and as he's renting a costume for the orgy comes across a debauched scene where the shop owner's daughter is basically being pimped to two Asian men.

Then comes the orgy, which in the unrated DVD is not censored like the theatrical release was, so at least some people are having sex on camera. Cruise doesn't, as he's immediately pegged for an interloper. But there is lots of female nudity here, perhaps the most of any major release in the last twenty years.

There's an aura of artificiality to the film, and I'm not sure if it's intentional. The Greenwich Village in which Cruise wanders was constructed in England's Pinewood Studios, and the orgy scene borders between erotic and ludicrous. Many of the scenes seem more like fantasy than reality--certainly all the times I've ever been in Greenwich Village I've never been propositioned by someone who looks like Shaw (I was once solicited by a young woman who was a frightful sight). A key scene is when Kidman reveals to Cruise that she had a dream in which she had sex with many men, and the whole movie could be boiled down to a dream state, although the events do happen.

Kubrick turned in the final cut six days before he died. It was a shoot of 400 days, which the Guinness Book Of World Records calls the longest continuous shoot of any film in history. It was released to generally good reviews but I think the film is now something of an embarrassment when it comes to Kubrick's canon.

Still, it has some great Kubrickian touches, such as the use of classical music (mostly a waltz by Shostakovich) and a brilliant cameo by Alan Cumming as a hotel clerk. It's not really an entertaining film, it's more of a curiosity, like stumbling across dirty magazines in your parents' closet.