Promises Unkept

Rating: Null/10 (16 July 1999)

Eyes Wide Shut is a movie that keeps getting interesting without ever actually getting interesting.
Anticipation, titillation, innuendo, foreboding and foreshadowing pervade the film but I felt I never got the payoff that the story seemed to be promising.
Manhattan physician Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his beautiful wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) attend a Chistmas party where they both flirt with other people.
Discussing the party afterwards, Alice tells Bill about a chance encounter in their past that led her to fantasize about another man. This seems to upset Bill, and it sets him up to pursue an opportunity to attend a mysterious masked ball that involves a lot of beautiful naked women. If this sounds a bit confusing, well, it is.
For the life of me, I cannot imagine what director Stanley Kubrick (who also co-wrote the screenplay) was trying to say. I wonder if he knew. Eyes Wide Shut is pretty and sexy but utterly pointless. In the end it's not that you don't care what happened to the characters--you're not even sure WHAT happened to them.
It's hard to believe that this is the same director who gave us The Killing, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
If this this movie is Kubrick's epitaph, his life ended not with a bang, but a whimper.