Very Conflicted

Rating: 4/10 (8 September 2019)

Kubrick's final cinematic offering is very powerful and intriguing... but a huge disappointment for me personally. Eyes Wide Shut is an intense and steamy chronicle of deception, marriage, and human desire. Eyes Wide Shut is a highly pretentious, morally ambiguous, and an unusually graphic melodrama masquerading as high-art. With grand and intricate architecture, a moody musical score, a lot of slow talking, and purposefully graphic imagery... are all things that took away from this movie being great. The dialogue was well written, but the line-delivery was weak and every sequence was at least twenty minutes too long. This movie was high on my radar list for years... I waited until I felt like I was ready... and I wasn't. Either I wasn't ready (which I'm fine with admitting), or this film is simply a melodramatic bore trying to be something that it's not. The camerawork, the director, and the cast are really the only things this movie has going for it. Without those things, this movie would have been truly awful. I looked deeper into the ideas and themes... thought it was purposefully and forcefully symbolic and painfully pretentious/self-indulgent. I tried seeing the directors vision, somewhat understood it? But was still let down, confused, and very conflicted. Stanley Kubrick didn't have to show such extremely over-acted and steamy love scenes, disturbing sexual content, and an unsettling/moody atmosphere to get his point across... that is, if he had a point. Kubrick is still my all-time favourite director... but this film, this film was a mess.