July 16, 1999 | Stanley Kubrick knew what you’d be expecting, and maybe even hoping for, when you bought a ticket to see Eyes Wide Shut. And so, during the opening seconds of this sexually charged fantasia, he gives it to you right between the eyes: Nicole Kidman casually shimmies out of her slinky black dress, and then just stands there, resplendently naked, for a heartbeat or two.
And you can’t help thinking that, somewhere beyond the grave, the most cerebral of celebrity filmmakers is enjoying the most satisfying of last laughs. It’s as though Kubrick, who passed away shortly after completing his final edit, wanted to warn us: “By the time you see this movie, you will have heard a lot about it. But don’t kid yourself: You have no idea what to expect.”
Kubrick manages to keep us in the dark for a lot longer than might seem possible or even prudent during Eyes Wide Shut. And much like the central character played by Tom Cruise, we only gradually perceive something like the truth. Beneath its glossy surface realism, beyond the glare of its blinding star power, the movie leads us on journey –- at once literal and metaphoric — through a puzzling labyrinth of fear and desire.
Cruise plays Dr. William Harford, a successful Manhattan physician with a radiantly beautiful wife (Kidman, Cruise’s real-life spouse), a perfectly adorable young daughter (Madison Eginton) and a luxurious Central Park West apartment. With deft economy, Kubrick quickly establishes Harford as a man who has mastered the delicate art of seeming solicitously concerned while maintaining his professional reserve. Even when he’s called away from a Christmas party by his nervous host (Sydney Pollack), who brings him upstairs to tend to a naked cutie who has O.D.’d, Harford remains unruffled. “You know,” he tells the drug-addled woman in his most soothingly nonjudgmental tone, “you have to get into a detox program.”
No doubt about it: Whether he is flirting with supermodels or dealing with medical emergencies, Harford is a man who takes pride in being serenely self-possessed. But then he goes back to that Central Park West apartment with Alice, his radiantly beautiful wife. And the very next evening, he gets that confident smile slapped right off his face.
In a masterfully sustained sequence that should generate serious Oscar buzz, Kidman is utterly mesmerizing as Alice – annoyed by her husband’s smugness, loosened up by a few puffs of pot -– bares her soul. During the family’s summer vacation in Cape Cod, she says, she noted a handsome naval officer at their hotel. They never spoke; she never even learned his name. But merely seeing him filled her with such intense desire that she knew, with absolute certainty, that she would have abandoned everything – her husband, her daughter, everything -– if he would have beckoned her to join him for a night of lovemaking.
Not surprisingly, Harford is profoundly shaken by his wife’s heretofore unspoken desires. (Note how Kubrick underscores their sudden emotional estrangement –- Cruise and Kidman never appear together in the same frame throughout her narrative.) Fortuitously, the phone rings, signaling the arrival of bad news -– a patient has just died –- that allows the good doctor to make an abrupt departure. Out on his own, away from his wife, Hartford finds himself beset by jealousy – and primed for sexual misadventure.
Eyes Wide Shut is a contemporary story based on Dream Story, a novella by Arthur Schnitzer (1862-1931), a writer who earned the admiration of Sigmund Freud with his tales of psychosexual conflicts. Working with co-screenwriter Frederic Raphael, Kubrick has transferred the plot from turn-of-the-century Vienna to dawn-of-new-millennium Manhattan. (Or, to be more specific, to the Manhattan that Kubrick re-created on a London soundstage.) But it remains, quite literally, a “dream story,” in that Harford travels through a nightworld of chance encounters and fantasy fulfillments that don’t seem entirely real, and often evidence the ruthless logic of a nightmare.
One thing leads to another: A sudden profession of love by a woman Harford hardly knows, a collision with violently aggressive thugs, an interrupted interlude with a lovely prostitute, an impulsive reunion with an old classmate (Todd Field) who just happens to moonlight as a pianist at a secluded mansion where ritualistic orgies are held.
Deeply curious, and perhaps more lustful than he would admit to himself, Harford crashes a party where masked participants copulate with blasé abandon. (To avoid an NC-17 rating, Kubrick was forced to digitally alter a few scenes by blocking simulated sex with synthetic shadows.) The movie comes perilously close to silliness as the directors of the orgy melodramatically condemn Harford as an unwelcome stranger in their paradise. But after the party ends -– for Harford, at least -– the movie regains its footing, and slowly moves toward the doctor’s ambiguous encounter with yet another person who has some unpleasant surprises to spring.
Time and again, Harford is forced to recognize how little he genuinely comprehends about people he thought he knew, about events he assumed he understood. This process of enlightenment, not the baring of skin, is what Eyes Wide Shut really is all about. Harford views himself as the center of the universe until he is pushed back to take in the bigger picture. Almost in spite of himself, he must acknowledge that everyone – his wife, his friends, casual acquaintances, passing strangers -– is living his or her own story. And in each of these stories, he is, at best, a supporting player.
Cruise often has been under-rated as an actor -– partially because of his ever-boyish good looks, partially because of his willingness to play straight man to flashier co-stars. (Take another look at Rain Man, and you’ll see that he, not Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman, is giving the more fully developed and subtly detailed performance.) Here, Cruise spends most of his time responding to the revelations of others – reacting rather than acting -– and that is precisely what he must do for Eyes Wide Shut to reflect Kubrick’s vision. Not many superstars in Cruise’s orbit would accept such a passive role. Even fewer could play the role so winningly.
Surprisingly — amazingly, actually, when you consider Kubrick’s notoriously cynical view of human nature -– the journey concludes with a flicker of hope, a suggestion of redemption. Indeed, one is tempted to describe the movie as humane, if only in comparison to the director’s other works. But that temptation is easily resisted when you consider that, except for the ending, almost everything else in Eyes Wide Shut is as meticulously stylized and coolly formalistic as anything Kubrick ever offered his audiences. Cruise and Kidman are able to raise the temperature just a bit with their risky and sympathetic performances. But even they cannot generate enough warmth to offset the prevailing chill. And that is altogether appropriate: Stanley Kubrick never wanted you to love his movies or the people in them. He just wanted you to be challenged and provoked by his handiwork.
