eyes (& ears & mind) apparently shut ... while making this movie

Rating: 2/10 (11 August 1999)

Two words: Pretentious Drudgery. And Nicole Kidman still can't act ... To Die For was a fluke. Two recent movies that dealt well with the concept of what you don't know about your lover's insides are Happiness and Your Friends and Neighbors. I recommend them both. This one was an utter bore, and I swear I tried really hard!
What was Kubrick thinking? A 2001 pacing to a 1960's exploration of infidelity and no f*cking boundaries. With a little 1990's window dressing culture? This movie was way way way bloated with cliched dialogue, actors hammering out every banal word, zero charisma, and poor characterizations.
How much more meaningful it would have been with a normal relaxed human pacing, off-hand unself-conscious line delivery, not so heavy-handed confusion of one "whore" with another and a truly meaningfully vested characterization of the wife role.
How about a (younger) Annette Bening in the role (?Renee Zellweger)? Give the wife some warmth, a quality of having deep and easy capacity to love and be loved, a genuine emotional involvement as a mother .... instead of a detached neuraesthenic shell. How interesting it then would have been to see her inability to repress her involuntary fantasies of passionate devastation. Then we could understand the husband's struggle with her "dreams." Instead we are left to fail making any distinction between an empty wife/mother/lover and the "whores" in the night. Where is the tension? Where is the struggle for when this man has only half a human soul? There was no story ... if Cruise's character had any depth to him, as soon as he recovered from the parallax of pot and saw her for what she was, he would have filed for divorce immediately. EWS misses the point! How can we be troubled by the lust that threatens substance when there IS NO SUBSTANCE?! All in all, Eyes Wide (Robbed) Blind was an abominable bore, a self-involved little piece of mock manhood obsessed over to the point of cloying involution, an insult to my intelligence, a waste of my time (and I want my money back!) Stanley Kubrick, a masterful filmmaker, has unfortunately been reduced to a two year-old fascinated with watching his "duty" circle the bowl. How embarrassing that his last airs ... came out the wrong end!