A jarring film.

Rating: Null/10 (16 July 1999)

"Eyes Wide Shut" is a piece that tiptoes on intensity and jumps at you with wordless, embittered actors. The plot is a tad ambiguous, but without giving anything away:
Nicole Kidman plays the wife of William Harford, a doctor who has just learned that his betrothed has had serious and barely not-acted-upon thoughts of infidelity. She tells him of a could/would-have-been fling that turns his perception of his marraige upside down, and in passive-aggressive retaliation, he journeys onto the cold, rainy streets of Manhattan for a sexual deviancy tale of his own. Through pure happenstance, William is referenced to a party by his friend Nick, a jazz pianist who is a friend from college. Hinting of haughtiness is intriguing enough for the good doctor to go through extreme measures required to attend the engagement. The party, well, the party is a ritualistic orgy where a mask and the word "Fidelio" are tickets to entry. The uninvited are unwelcome and once Bill's naivete is revealed to all members of the party, he is harshly reprimanded and warned never to speak of what he has seen again. The rest of the film's goings-on are either a bi-product of Harford's curiosity as to what lied beneath the mask of the eerie social gathering or the dream-like opportunities for sexual exploration that the handsome main character receives from the women he aligns with throughout the story.
All of this hangs under a raincloud of the late director Stanley Kubrick's morbid and exact vision of the Arthur Schnitzler's book "Traumnovelle". And Kubrick leaves nothing to chance. Having had a notorious shooting schedule (something like 15 months), every facial tick, every hand gesture is obviously just how the director wants. However, the question I ask is if the film is as appealing to the general public as it was the Stanley Kubrick. Although it does have a bag of moments that share grandiose and impacting depth and cinematic brilliance, a large chunk is a little too unexplained(or, dare I say, uncompleted) for anyone but truth-seeking, goateed film students donning black turtlenecks to have the energy to want to understand.
Should you go see it? Definitely. But don't go see it for the hyped and ultimately tame "sex" scenes. And don't go see it expecting any "Jerry Maguire"-like smugness out of Cruise. And I advise you against going and expecting the second coming of Christ. Because you'll be disappointed. What you will find however is a honestly good and intriguing film that may be iffy in some areas, but cannot be called bad. "Eyes Wide Shut", artistically speaking, is solid but culturally, lacks the same kind of studio hooks presented in some of Tom Cruise's prior popcorn vehicles. It is only fair to my enjoyment of "Shut" to point out that some people hear the word "artistically" and immediately conjure up stuffy, boring dramas that seem to never end. That is not the case here. It might run a little long, but this movie will keep you on the edge of your seat despite its refusal to "sell out". That is part of many of the complaints about the film. In a society where we have been conditioned on the same "table of contents"-like plots in our summer fare, here's one that actually risks dangling the explanation in front of our faces with Manchurian pacing, making sure we trot along in hopes of eventually being privvied to complete discretion. This has always been a metaphor for the filmmaker's own professional practices, which makes "Eyes Wide Shut" all the more a poetic homage to the stubborn genius of Stanley Kubrick.