Really a heck of a movie

Rating: 9/10 (6 March 2002)

This is not your ordinary movie. If I told you the meaning underlying it all -- and I'm not going to -- you wouldn't sleep so well. If you're searching for answers, the note slipped to Bill at the front gate of Somerton tells you all you need to know: "Give up your inquiries which are completely useless, and consider these words a second warning. We hope, for your own good, this will be sufficient." If you've just seen it a first time and are trying to find answers, you've been way out of your depth the last two-and-a-half hours.
Okay, enough with the games. Seriously now: this movie is quite extraordinary, and it comes as no big surprise that Stanley Kubrick was rumored to have considered this his best movie. It would certainly be hard to top _2001: A Space Odyssey_, but the movies definitely have a couple things in common: (1) They both play intensely on ambiguity, driving away many a viewer; (2) Reviled so roundly at the time of their release, they did or will both come to be widely regarded as cinematic masterpieces, groundbreaking filmmaking, and classics. On the basis of visual appearance alone -- and we're not just talking here about all the beautiful women that appear in the film -- the film is tantalizing and rivals any of Kubrick's best along these lines (notably _Barry Lyndon_), enough so to grant some level of credence to the above-mentioned rumor.
On a first viewing of the film, there's nothing particularly extraordinary about the movie on its surface, save for the orgy sequence (notoriously edited in a chicken-salad fashion to satisfy the MPAA's arbitrary-applied standards). And, really, what you get up front is a fairly standard Hollywood-type "mystery thriller" infused with hokey scenes and dialogue. It's only when you take a further look at this film and try to analyze it in terms we can rationally understand, that things really begin to unravel. The reaction to this by many will be, "Well, then it's just a piece of junk." But that would be to miss the whole point of what Kubrick was trying to do with this film. (At least I think I have some idea of what he was trying to do with the film.) There is plenty of good reason to think that what Kubrick wanted is a movie that DIDN'T hold together when things try to be explained. There is a very good reason that ambiguity and bafflement set in when you truly question what the heck you're seeing in front of you. I don't think it's any mistake that the movie is titled as it is.
One visual cue to note -- and this is one over and above the rich visual tapestry contained throughout the film -- is the character of the film stock itself. The warm glow given off by the lights throughout is accentuated because of the way the film stock (the celluloid itself of whatever material they use now) was developed in such a way as to give a very slight haze to everything every moment of the movie. What was somewhat all-too-obvious in a famous scene from Alfred Hitchcock's _Vertigo_ is now used in a very subtle manner throughout the whole of _Eyes Wide Shut_. That the whole of the movie is infused throughout by this subtle hint of unreality is just the first clue as to what the heck is going on. Some reviewers have mentioned how the movie could use a good dose of David Lynch's filmmaking technique, but that misses the point: the unreality or ambiguity or duality of things is all-too-apparent right on the surface of his films. With _Eyes Wide Shut_, to make it readily apparent would destroy the point.
_Eyes Wide Shut_ carries with it a chief virtue of a film: it invites endless wonderment, thought, reflection, etc. The richly layered meanings, non-meanings, invitations to further inquiry, the seeming contradiction of so much of it, is both frustrating and fascinating. After several viewings of this film, on and off for about a year now, I won't look at movies the same way again (this goes for Kubrick's other movies as well). A movie that has the power to change the way you look at film is a rare movie, indeed.