All that hype over a 90 second Scene? No way!

Rating: Null/10 (14 May 2002)

Those who have criticized Eyes Wide Shut as an inelegant misinterpretation of 'Dream Story' have misunderstood both the adaptions necessary for an objective visual medium and Kubrick's own daunting artistic stamp. Eyes Wide Shut inverts the psychological dialectic of Schnitzler's novella into a dark metaphysical mosaic. The dilemma for the viewer is not to reconcile the dream state logic to the visceral reality, but to fathom the perception of the protagonist as he is enveloped by anger, jealousy and fear. Kubrick creates an integrated tapestry of the malignant manifestation of deformed desire. The streets of New York form the backdrop of danger and threat; every venality is accepted and bartered here. Distractions or interruptions invade every possibility of intimacy in the film. Sex and death are juxtaposed in a sustaining motif. Like a hall of mirrors, look alike characters, distorted fragments of Bill and Alice, appear throughout the movie.
Victor Zeigler seems a potent, savage stage manager. His final ultimatum to Bill holds the entire plot. Like peeling layers of an onion he unmasks the competing emotions and possibilities of the events. Nothing being said here can be taken at face value. Both are well aware of a subtext. Ziegler casts down his comments with avuncular condescension, like an encyclical from a throne. He offers a recourse to facile rationalizations (as Kubrick does to the audience), but this masks a core of corruption and ulterior motive. He is not offering a choice. Bill is lucky to be alive. The film slips, for the moment, its filters of dream, fantasy and deception and comes into sharp moral focus. Is the good doctor really worried about the fate of his friend Nick, or the nature of Mandy's death. No, his inquiries go straight to the obsessional suspicions which drove him into the night. The frightening, tantalizing implications of his own experience are the limits of his conscience. He accepts Victor's frail reassurances and leaves.
Bill finally finds the prospect of his wife's infidelity both tormenting and irresistibly intoxicating. The final scene seems to indicate that all pretensions have evaporated. Something primitive, overwhelming has taken over, the same force that has propelled his odyssey from the beginning. There are a series of revelations (to the observant and receptive) as the film progresses, but they do not disentangle the ambiguities. Kubrick involves his audience along with his characters in an encroaching awareness, like an engulfing flood.
This director never resorts to trivial, happy endings. His bleak vision of the human condition is the binding element in his films. All paths lead to the same nihilistic conclusion. Nothing is resolved of Alice's taunts, sexual dissatisfaction and secret desires Where, then, can this marriage go but abandonment to the shadows and creatures which inhabit every corner of Kubrick's city? He leaves just enough, though, to reclaim a glimmer of grace and hope, an escape portal from the labrynthe. In this, EWS brilliantly synthesizes the essence of his previous films.
The indistinct borders between fact and illusion become moot to the theme. Bill's desperate sojourn through this modern mythological underworld forms a classical tableau, where the contradictions of impulse and character ARE the projected reality. This should be the great director's most enduring achievement. The cast is uniformly excellent. Kubrick's cinematic genius is most obvious in its stunning visual impact, but Eyes Wide Shut's real power in its subtlety, and the indelible and disturbing impression it makes on the mind.
10/10
1999 159 mintues Rated: R CC.