Wild Orchid 2 with soaring aspirations

Rating: Null/10 (18 July 1999)

The last and least of Kubrick's twelve extant features, EYES WIDE SHUT suggests a wistful postscript to the theme that dominated the director's career: the turning of men into machines. In EYES, the machinelike master director yearns to be a man--to make a non-misogynistic, non-misanthropic movie that sits at eye level with its characters, viewing them with empathy rather than lordly detachment.
That the attempt is a sad botch stems first from Kubrick's choice of scenarist. Frederic Raphael is a witty and craftsmanlike British screenwriter who left the movie scene (more or less) after writing DARLING and TWO FOR THE ROAD. One can only speculate that Kubrick chose the sixtyish Brit to tell the story of an attractive, upwardly mobile Central Park West couple (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman) because he wanted a brainy but controllable foot soldier to do his bidding. (Kubrick touched up Raphael's script.)
Kubrick's and Raphael's incomprehension of contemporary sexual mores, the details of behavior and language that are specific to late-nineties America, gives this adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's "Traumnovelle" a generic, uninvestigated, sketched-in feel. Unlike the phony-looking Vietnam backdrops shot in England for FULL METAL JACKET, the upscale-Manhattan ambience of EYES isn't meant to be deliberately stylized and out-of-time; it just rings phony, flat. And the flatfooted approach to scene-building that's charming in a movie like THE SHINING--where, in beginner's fashion, Kubrick opens scenes with handshakes and hellos and ends them with goodbyes--squashes whatever atmospherics Kubrick intends here. A fairly simple night-on-the-wild-side tale is molasses'd into coma by Kubrick's plodding.
Visually generally undistinguished--except for a near-autistic fascination with the trippy properties of Christmas-tree lights--and clotted with dreadful bit players (Kubrick's favorite style of acting seems to be found in the featured parts in Hammer horror movies), EYES suggests a grotesquely attenuated episode of RED SHOE DIARIES. The problem is that our experience of sexuality has changed since Kubrick first announced plans for this movie, before the release of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE--but somehow the period stretching from amyl nitrate and herpes to Monica's cigar didn't reach Kubrick Manor, where the height of id-run-amok is depicted as a group of medieval-styled swingers staging a sort of Benedictine theme orgy.
When the hero is meant to be chastened and shattered by his experience of Sex Untrammeled, you can only stare at the screen in bafflement. Are we really meant to think that a wealthy, good-looking doctor--surely a one-time raging frat boy--has spent his adult life in New York City and never encountered drag queens, fetish balls, subway perverts, winking hookers? Tom Cruise's performance as the regular guy undone is the best thing about the movie. His boyishness and air of unsinkability, so dull when placed in synch with a go-for-it Simpson-Bruckheimer movie, gives energy and poignancy to what would otherwise be a strictly academic exercise. Nicole Kidman is an able actress who's wrecked by Kubrick's direction--which seems to be modeled after the ticking metronome David Mamet uses to hypnotize his actors like chickens. Her giggly-airhead business in the first scenes seems to be roiling toward a boil, but then Kubrick hands her a pot-smoking big-revelation scene that seems to have been paced after the fashion of an exposition-fest in an Ed Wood movie. Blam--Kidman gets vaporised by the doomsday machine.
What's touching about EYES WIDE SHUT is both that the Schnitzler material seems to have meant a lot to Kubrick, and that he had no idea what it meant. Kubrick just didn't trust himself, or didn't trust that it would be commercially sound, to give Schnitzler's ideas their proper language--free-form Expressionist poetry. Fearing becoming David Lynch, he turned himself into Adrian Lyne. Kubrick clearly took pains to make a movie that wasn't "clinical," sex-negative, girly-objectifying. But he also seems to have lost what he wanted the material to say. What's left is an "erotic thriller" paced like a late Rossellini movie. It's possible that Kubrick, a valedictorian at thesis-making, didn't have the understanding of the soft insides of human beings to make this kind of movie. Or, sadder still, nearing the age of seventy, he didn't have the energy to bring it together.