Visually interesting, but little else to recommend it.

Rating: 4/10 (28 March 2006)

Kubrick seems to have had a habit of vacillating between movies that are primarily visual and plot driven, and ones that are word-heavy. Sparticus was followed by Lolita, 2001 by A Clockwork Orange. Eyes wide shut falls into the later category, and frankly, Kubrick's never been very good at it.
The entire movie is based on a simple premise; the male lead is astonished to learn that his wife has (unfullfilled) sexual fantasies involving other men. This leads to an escalating series of events that fills the rest of the movie.
The problem is that we're supposed to believe that this admission would actually be surprising to anyone. Is there any man that is not aware of this fact? I can see this being a plot of a movie from the 1960s perhaps, but today it simply feels outdated, maybe even misogynist. An actual affair sparking things off might be believable, but he's upset because she _looks_ at other men? Come on! It just doesn't ring true. The plot feels completely artificial.
To add to the problems, the movie is heavily based on dialog, and it is here that Kubrick always seems to fall flat. The dialog is filled with pregnant pauses and flat dialog, one assumes deliberately, that simply add to the overall artificiality of the plot. People simply don't talk like they do when Kubrick directs them, and I found it sad to see two otherwise fine actors (yes, Cruise is a fine actor) reduced to a series of bland, empty statements. There was nothing remotely like emotion coming out of either one. Nothing could put this into better contrast than the final line of dialog, which Kidman delivers in an astonishingly unconvincing manner.
On the good side, Kubrick's visual taste remains as good as ever. The motion is slow, but this is deliberate, and works well. It would have worked much better had the movie been 120 minutes, instead of 159. Once again it seems Kubrick couldn't resist the siren-call of introducing bit characters, filling up some time and then instantly cutting them adrift.
I have to say that overall the movie isn't _that_ bad. Faint praise indeed, I know. But simply put, if not for Kubrick's earlier body of work, and well-timed death, this movie would have disappeared without a trace.