Moldy. Very moldy.

Rating: 3/10 (5 July 2004)

Just the other night, I saw this movie again on HBO, which has been re-running it for some inexplicable reason. My dislike of it hasn't changed in the 5 intervening years since I first saw it. Although it's not quite the UNMITIGATED disaster some claim, *Eyes Wide Shut* is still pretty ludicrous: there will be no later revising-upward of critical opinion, a la
*2001: A Space Odyssey*. It will rather be remembered for more morbid reasons; to wit, for killing Kubrick and sundering the marriage of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
For the real-life peripherals surrounding the movie were more interesting than the movie itself -- which, I'm sorry to say, is really, really, really old hat for cinephiles. I realize that this film and its director have a huge fan-club, as evidenced by hundreds of glowing -- if naive -- reviews on this website, but please spare me the lectures that my dislike of the film indicates that I "just don't get it". No, YOU don't get it. *Eyes Wide Shut* is "art-house cinema" for the lazy people, for the people who can't be bothered to force themselves to watch all those subtitled foreign movies from several decades ago that have already, and AMPLY, covered this same material. Doubtless, these same lazy people haven't bothered to read much Schnitzler or even Freud, for that matter. And thus, they're not bored to death by *Eyes Wide Shut*. They see "genius", while I'm looking at the same old thing. I dunno, but from where I sit, Schnitzler's psycho-sexual theories, while provocative in the mid-Twenties when he wrote the story on which this film is based, are anachronisms in today's culture that boasts of an 50%+ divorce rate. And so what's the result of Kubrick's unwieldy update of 1920's-Vienna to 1999-New York City? Total absurdity, when we realize that Tom Cruise's character, Bill "I'm-A-Doctor" Harford, is actually amazed that his wife once had a sexual fantasy involving a Naval officer. The whole ludicrous situation is laid out in a ludicrous scene, in which we also learn that Nicole Kidman is so unsatisfied as a wife that a mere GLANCE from the Navy guy would've caused her to abandon her husband and young daughter. I don't know any women who would behave in such a way. (I've only read them in Freud.)
This all drives poor Dr. Harford quite mad (dear God, perhaps she even had sexual partners BEFORE I EVEN MET HER!), and he hits the street (an unrecognizable New York City -- the movie was filmed, obviously, in London), looking for a good time. Or something. I guess the idea here is revenge against his wife's dirty, dirty thoughts. Or something. Without belaboring the plot-points, let's just say that he ends up visiting hookers, nubile daughters of haberdashers, among others, but Kubrick doesn't permit our hero
(TOM CRUISE, okay?) to actually score. But then, the whole silly thing is unlikely in the first place. Eventually the movie gets to its centerpiece: a campy orgy straight out of a De Sade spoof, with waving incense, chants, creepy electro-organ music, and hundreds of interchangeable naked girls wearing only high-heels and really cool Venetian masks. We are, I believe, meant to nod wisely at Kubrick's "commentary" concerning the impersonality of sex outside the sacred marriage bond. *Eyes Wide Shut*, in others words, is a movie made by a happily married man of 4 decades.
By the time we get to the orgy, the bored cinephile's only interest is considering how much better Fellini would've done this sort of thing. After all, Fellini, though sloppy, was a true surrealist . . . and along those lines, Bunuel would've made a sheer masterpiece of this movie. But Kubrick was inspired, so many years ago, by the dour Antonioni: they each certainly had their share of bourgeois baggage to bring to their work. The point being, this is a movie without any heat, without any fun. The focus is on the backlash of erotic freedom, with the supposed irony of our hero's not being able to actually enjoy any of that freedom during the course of the film. Some here have found this to be profound, and perhaps it would've seemed more profound to me if this film had been a period piece set in, say, the 1800's -- a time in which sexual autonomy was strictly a deeply private idea to be smothered in guilt and the flames of Hell. But in 1999's New York, it's a weird and ultimately pointless anachronism. And sadly it's not even redeemed with the usual photographic brilliance one expects from Kubrick: the picture is grainy, gritty, and even glaring (you keep having this urge to turn down either your color or the contrast on your TV set), overly schematic in terms of "color-coding" (blue lighting indicates chasteness; red lighting indicates erotic danger). Indeed, the whole movie is full of shallow symbols a la the lighting -- the perfect movie, in other words, for film grads writing their thesis. What a bore.
I'll refrain from adding in-depth to the countless comments about the inanity of the dialogue and the tepidness of the performances. I'll only say this much: not much of a surprise here, given the director's track record with bad "star" performances in favor of quirky minor players who enliven things a bit in his movies. Needless to say, these bit parts by talented character actors add just about the only enjoyable elements to a sad last at-bat from Stanley Kubrick.