flawed Kubrick opus

Rating: 6/10 (29 July 1999)

Is it heresy or sacrilege to suggest at this late date - and particularly in light of his recent death - that Stanley Kubrick's films have almost always been better at promising than delivering greatness? Almost without exception, Kubrick's carefully crafted works have emerged as brilliantly clinical "exercises" rather than fully involving works of timeless art. Audacious, visionary, always willing to push the envelope and challenge an audience to go where it may not want to - these are the hallmarks of Kubrick's directorial genius. But, along with these virtues, comes a heavy list of counterweighing weaknesses that somehow distance an audience emotionally from what is occurring on the screen: pretentiousness, laborious pacing, narrative choppiness, often static camerawork. "Eyes Wide Shut" fits perfectly into this standard Kubrick mold. Starting with a fascinating premise, Kubrick takes his audience into unexpected and challenging directions, yet fails to really cope with the complexities of the theme and make the audience care. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman portray a young, upwardly mobil couple, who live in New York City with their young daughter. When Kidman, in one of the year's best scenes, reveals in a wrenching monologue that she has had serious thoughts of infidelity, Cruise discovers he can't cope with the visions this admission conjurs up. Thus, he embarks on a sexual odyssey through the streets of the city which leads him into many bizarre and unexpected avenues of depravity including a club made up of the idle rich dressed in costumes and masks who stage orgies replete with secret passwords and portentous organ music. The problem lies essentially with the Kubrick/Frederick Rafael screenplay which can't seem to connect these scenes of flamboyant nastiness with the theme that is at the film's core. Cruise drifts into each of his adventures out of an understandable urge to experience this world of sexual perversity, but he seems to end up as a passive observer each time, with little or no revelation registered. This concept - of examining the effect that even implied infidelity can have on relationship - is such a rich one that it becomes a shame to see it buried under these scenes of often extraneous ostentation. Kubrick seems so enamored of his little "visions" that they begin to dominate the proceedings and bury the theme and the characters. This weakness is reflected in the film's far too tidy resolution, which is thoroughly unconvincing from a psychological viewpoint and makes one wonder how Kubrick could linger so long over scenes with no purpose beyond the sensational yet take so little time with the one that truly matters. Cruise and Kidman both turn in fine performances, but Sydney Pollack, as a wealthy friend who later in the film sets Cruise straight, hams it up shamelessly. The music is hauntingly effective and helps immeasureably to establish and sustain an atmosphere of portentous weirdness. The title "Eyes Wide Shut" will not describe most people in the audience - Kubrick is too skilled at creating an always riveting visual motif for that - but, for me, it will serve as a lasting testament less to his genius than to his maddening inability to fulfill his always great promise.