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Eyes Wide Shut
(rating
7 out of 10)
(1999, directed by Stanley Kubrick)
It's taken me a while to review Eyes Wide Shut, not because of the
audience and media's lukewarm reaction to it, but because it's a movie which lacks
urgency--it didn't send me running to my typewriter full of thoughts and perspectives. Of
all the films ever made, very few good ones are about Sex. I can think of half a dozen or
so. It seems fitting that the last interesting cinematic treatment of sex in the twentieth
century is brought to us by Kubrick. Putting the film's media detractors aside and taking
a look at it--it's a flawed enigmatic film which bears the unmistakable mark of its maker.
Eyes Wide Shut takes place in one week as an upper class Manhattan
married couple takes a walkabout into the harrowing essence of sexuality. Cruise plays Dr.
Bill Harford, a straight arrow who runs a succesful practice and has the beautifully
mannered Alice (Nicole Kidman) for his wife. Together they head out to a friend's party,
where they rub shoulders with socialites, sexual provocateurs and old friends. Kidman
drinks one too many as an older Don Juan attempts to seduce her. Cruise is led by the arm
by a couple of slim beauties who are seeking more than a dance. Temptation is in the air
and sexual depravity just a room away, as Cruise is called urgently by his friend to find
a naked mistress at the brink of death from an overdose. But the shocker comes later, as
Kidman, high on pot and on a venomous mood, confesses to Cruise she almost cheated on him
years ago with a navy cadet.
This rambling confession sends Cruise's closeted doctor into a strange
odyssey of erotic circumstances. In the space of one night, Cruise will have the daughter
of a client confess her obsessive love for him as her father lays freshly departed on his
deathbed and her fiancee comforts her; he will be tempted by a young comely prostitute; he
will witness a young girl caught in the act with a couple of older, horny chinamen--later
her father will pimp her out to the same men; and he will sneak his way into a secretive,
threatening, ritualistic sex party. The film succeeds in leading you pacefully by the hand
deeper and deeper into sexual misadventure. Cruise ultimately finds himself hip-deep in
murderous intrigue as people linked to the sex party-cult begin to dissappear and his life
and family are threatened.
Sounds good? Yes...until it all just ends. Kubrick comes close to
developing some unnerving sexual situations and conclusions when the film simply runs off
its spool. It's as if the screenwriter simply didn't know what to do next and just wrote
THE END. Cruise's anquished doctor does confess his misadventures to his wife, and when he
aks of her what will they do from there, she retorts: "I think we need to fuck."
And so it ends. After two years of hush-hush filming and the ten year
hiatus of Kubrick's directing, Eyes Wide Shut is a slow rollercoaster ride where the car
makes it all the way up the ride's highest peak only to stop and all the riders asked to
leave. Cinemax late-night soft porn flicks offer more risky sexcapades than Eyes Wide Shut
except that they haven't been shot with the meticulousness of a master director.
To give Kubrick credit, he doesn't direct badly, on the contrary he's
on top form. Kidman exudes a flaky, unnerving charisma as the doctor's wife. One of her
powerful scenes has her retelling in all lurid detail a dream in which she's the center of
a million-men orgy. With her criminal afflection, Kidman's dream account has more
emotional devastation than any real life infidelity. Cruise plays a quiet, desperate role
as a man ignorant of the world's ways. The scenes are atmospheric from the oppulence of a
Manhattan high class party to the intimidating imperial space of a guarded country estate.
Kubrick does this thing so well, where he moves the camera around the action in such a way
as to suggest the existence and presence of sheer space (which is why his version of THE
SHINING is one of the best horror films ever made). The goings-on at the sex mascarade
party are made more ominous by the movement of his camera. His choice of stark colors in
sets also add to the complete experience that is a Kubrick Film. And the nuances within
Eyes Wide Shut will make it a delicattessen watch for future filmlovers.
But all of Kubrick's techniques can't hide the fact that Eyes Wide Shut
is a film which doesn't "go all the way". Although it does contain some
thought-provoking ruminations about imagination and the role of sexual fantasies, it ends
too abruptly to show any significant ramifications to the character's experiences. Had
Kubrick developed the film beyond its final scene perhaps he would have led us into
mysterious uncharted territory. As it stands it's yet another flawed masterpiece by one of
film's greatest directors. An interesting footnote for the film history books.
Armando Valle
Aug/11/99
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