Annoying, Frustrating, Brilliant, Lurid, One-Of-A-Kind Sex Drama

Rating: 6/10 (7 May 2006)

Bill Harford is a well-to-do New York City doctor with a young family. After attending a party, he and his wife Alice have a row about infidelity and he is called out on business. During a strange night he is tempted to be unfaithful with both the daughter of a patient and a hooker, and gains admittance to a bizarre orgy at an out-of-town mansion. Scarred and vulnerable by the experiences, can he and Alice regain each other's love and trust ?
This is a tough movie for me to review. My admiration of Kubrick is boundless; he was an incomparable genius of film-making, a man who was peerless technically and the only director who never compromised on anything, ever. Unfortunately, he made two lemons in his career - Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut. Okay, that's unfair. I say they're lemons but by just about any other director's standards they would be their greatest work. And they are stunning films on several levels, but for me the subject-matter of both of them - sex and immorality - is turgid and uninteresting. Eyes Wide Shut is based on a dreary book called Traumnouvelle by Arthur Schnitzler, one of those early-twentieth century psychosexual writers who managed to gain acclaim by writing shock value prose with the fashionable Freudian conceits of the day. My summation of the plot of the movie above isn't really a summation, that is the whole story, in eighty words. All that leaves the two-and-a-half-hour movie with is characterisation (which there isn't much of either) and technique (which there is lots of). And so, like Barry Lyndon, it becomes a cold, beautiful film, like a Cartier diamond - rare, hypnotic and dazzling to look at, but ultimately uninvolving and flat. There are about twenty shots of Cruise walking down corridors in this movie, all of which are filmed with a master's perfection, but none of which really advance the story or tell us about the characters. There is fabulous low-key lighting, incredibly unsettling music by Jocelyn Pook, and marvellous editing, but the narrative is so slight it beggars belief. It's almost as if Kubrick set himself the challenge of taking a boring, threadbare book and transforming it into a fascinating, profound film; he succeeded, but it doesn't change the fact that the story is rubbish. It's also a movie where the style does not suit the material. The best scene is the big argument between Bill and Alice, which is shot close and feels very authentic, like a John Cassavetes drama. This, and other scenes, are completely at odds with the extremely stylised orgy section in the middle, which is vaguely risible, almost like a scene from a cheap horror flick about witchcraft. I think it's very difficult not to make people having sex on screen look comical and that wrecks the ooh-this-a-powerful-clique-of-debauched-sinners atmosphere the film is trying to create. Also, the ending is incredibly unsatisfying, a double-whammy of lameness, again entirely down to the plotting; not only do we not find out whether the hooker Mandy's death was an accident or something sinister, but Bill and Alice resolve their monumental differences with a few throwaway platitudes. Oh, and the title's stupid too. Okay, I'm probably whaling on this movie unfairly, but it's a thorn in my side. Kubrick was a genius, an absolute untouchable genius, but he took forever to make movies (five in thirty years) so when he picked this material I was incredibly disappointed and tragically he died of a heart attack literally days after finishing the final cut, so Eyes Wide Shut became his epitaph (as opposed to, for example, a much more interesting project he was working on, AI Artificial Intelligence, subsequently made by Steven Spielberg in 2001). What can I say that's good about Eyes Wide Shut ? It has some nice performances - I admire the way Cruise throws himself into the thankless role of Bill, a man questioning his morality but who lacks the courage to fulfill his fantasies, constantly trudging down hallways and streets and repeating the questions others have asked him. Both he and Kidman (who were married at the time) became grown-up actors as a consequence of making this film, and particularly in her case have gone on to challenging dramatic roles. I also like both Davis and Shaw as the two hookers, one high-class, one not, both of whom manage to make interesting women without much script to work from, and Kubrick's longtime assistant Leon Vitali plays the bizarre Red Cloak. For trivia buffs, the movie's production was the usual Kubrick litany of insane secretive meticulousness; despite the fact that numerous scenes take place on the streets of NYC, it was all shot on huge stages at Pinewood, the schedule was over a year long (probably a record), with Kubrick's usual one-hundred-takes-of-everything please ethic. Most notably, Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh were both original cast members, but Kubrick eventually fired Keitel and Leigh had other commitments and couldn't reshoot. How can I sum up ? This is a bad movie you have to see. Its faults lie in the story and script, but it has so many other interesting facets to it and it's such a unique nutty sex drama, it has to be experienced. However, don't judge Stan The Man by this film - check out Dr Strangelove (incredible), 2001: A Space Odyssey (mesmerising), A Clockwork Orange (astonishing), The Shining (terrifying) or Full Metal Jacket (stunning) to see the real genius of this master filmmaker.