# Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

### reviewed by
Jonathan Richards

    KUBRICK'S LAST WORD

    EYES WIDE SHUT
    Directed by Stanley Kubrick
    Screenplay by Kubrick & Frederick Raphael
    With Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman
    UA North, Lensic    R     145 min.

Stanley Kubrick died within a week after finishing his cut of this movie, and if he had any inkling of the critical and audience controversy he was spawning, he died a happy man. Some have hailed "Eyes Wide Shut" as a masterpiece, while others have suggested the emperor is as unclothed as most of the people in his movie. I have even heard it wildly speculated that he might have shot up a speedball and taken the easy way out rather than face the consequences of his folly. Now, how can you not want to see a movie that can kick up this kind of dust? "Eyes Wide Shut" is essentially a movie about family values with a lot of naked women in it. If that sounds like an intriguing recipe, the sad fact is that in the hands of the legendary cinematic genius, the dough did not rise on this last loaf. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains; if anything, too many pains were taken here, and the result is a strangely earthbound, unsurprising movie. Kubrick was known for working slowly. There are children in junior high who were not born when he made his previous film, "Full Metal Jacket", and there are children in preschool who were born since production began on "Eyes Wide Shut". Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh had to be replaced when the months began to turn into years. The little girl who plays Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's daughter must have been given a compressed shooting schedule; if she'd had to stick around for the two years Tom and Nicole did, the aging process would have shown (Tom and Nicole hold up pretty well.) The story, based by Kubrick and co-scenarist Frederick Raphael ("Two for the Road") is based on "Dream Story", a 1926 novella by Viennese author Artur Schnitzler. It follows Dr. Bill Harford and his wife Alice (Cruise and Kidman) through a couple of days of sexual fantasy and temptation. The fantasies are consummated, the temptations are not. After a Christmas party at the Manhattan mansion of a friend (Sydney Pollack) at which both are sexually tempted, they have a fight, and Alice taunts her husband with a memory of a naval officer with whom she would have gladly cheated. Bill is then called out into the night to the home of a patient who has just died. Over the course of a long night he is hit on, solicited, tempted, and in the movie's centerpiece scene, attends a masked orgy at a palatial Long Island estate (unforgivably digitally altered by the MPAA to protect the innocent), but the closest he comes to actual sex are his tortured fantasies of Alice and the naval officer. "Eyes Wide Shut" is full of intellectual concepts about sex and human nature, but very few of them translate into cinematic life. Kubrick constructs complex metaphors with color, using a palette dominated by reds, blues, and yellows, and constantly fragmented by the garish lights on the Christmas trees that turn up in every scene. He does a treatise on masks, and some of it is eerily effective. He ruminates about the nature of men and women -- Alice tries to provoke Bill by being deliberately hurtful, Bill uses deception to try to avoid stirring things up. Bill can be thoughtless and condescending, Alice tends toward the irrational and emotional. Bill has a maddening habit of repeating what's said to him ("What do you think?" "What do I think?"); eliminate the repetitions and the pauses that mount agonizingly as the film slows and slows in the last third, and Kubrick could have brought it in under two hours. Who knows what he might have done if he'd lived a little longer? Kubrick famously edited up to the last minute. But for all his profound ideas, lavish sets (he built New York in London, and the result is a mesmerizingly off-keel and strangely all- white Manhattan) and attention to detail, the goods just aren't there on film. Dialogue is banal ("You know what they say -- once a doctor, always a doctor") and, especially in the unfortunate last scene, painfully direct in tying up philosophical threads ("A dream is never just a dream.") There are some terrific small performances, notably Marie Richardson and Alan Cumming, but Kubrick's direction of Pollack's big scene is embarrassing, and Cruise and Kidman don't quite manage characters that make us believe or care. Having said all this, there's only room here to graze the iceberg of things to talk about with "Eyes Wide Shut". Kubrick's screen legacy is so rich, and his legend so powerful, that we bring loaded expectations to this movie, for better or for worse , and we find ourselves endlessly discussing and examining meanings, successes, failures, images, details, inconsistencies, motives, metaphors, music, prurience, eroticism and the lack of it, dreams and reality. In the end, after the disappointment of his last movie, this becomes Kubrick's final success.

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