Eyes Wide Shut

Rating: Null/10 (14 September 2010)

About twenty minutes into Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, I find a familiar question on my mind. It's a question I've pondered often, a question I find myself asking nearly every time I see Tom Cruise on film: namely, why is this guy in this movie? I'm not one of those people who hates Tom Cruise, I just think he's a pretty bad actor bless his heart. And he's laboriously clenching his face and waving his hands, and his wife Nicole Kidman is doing some equally ingratiating non-imitation of human behavior, and grand master Kubrick is standing behind the camera taking it all in in steady, sustained shots--what's going on here? Tom and Nicole are performing, but they're not acting.
Thus, Eyes Wide Shut sort of fails as an exploration of characters, but it finds an odd success as something else entirely: a study of icons. It is no accident, of course, that Kubrick's sex odyssey stars a then-high profile then-married Hollywood couple: "Cruise Kidman Kubrick" is the film's only tag line. And while I was never invested in Tom's Dr. Bill, I was fascinated to see Cruise himself deal with the pressure of society's hypocritical sexual demands. After all, we hold our icons to a strict standard of monogamy while simultaneously conditioning their continued celebrity on a preposterous hypersexuality; it's our ever- present threat of sexual judgment and ridicule that pushes Cruise's character into a freaky sex cult, and pushes Cruise into celebrity marriages and couch-hopping lunacy. I can't guess to what extent Cruise and Kidman are in on the film's central conceit, but it seems clear to me that Kubrick's aspirations lie outside of traditional character-based narrative cinema.
Eyes Wide Shut is no Strangelove or Clockwork or 2001, but it is an interesting deconstruction of celebrity. If Tom Cruise is strange, confused and detached, we're complicit in the societal sexual hypocrisy that makes him that way. -TK 9/14/10