Eyes Wide Shut

Rating: 5/10 (9 July 2016)

Eyes Wide Shut was Stanley Kubrick's final film. He died before the film's wide release. The film was in production for over a year requiring various re-shoots. It starred the then husband and wife team of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
Dr Bill Harford (Cruise) is a successful young doctor with his own practice, beautiful wife, young daughter and a swanky apartment in Manhattan.
After attending a lavish party where Bill flirted a bit and later smoking some pot in their apartment. His wife Alice (Kidman) tells him that she once fantasised leaving him for a sexy sailor. This rocks Bill as he now keeps imagining his wife having sex with the sailor.
This sets Bill on a road to strange encounters where he lets his inhibitions drop and walk the wild side of life. He meets a woman that is a hooker, a bereaved daughter lunges and kisses him. He goes to a fancy dress shop where the owner's nubile daughter gives him the come on. Bill gets an old medical school friend, now a piano player to reveal to him the location of a place where wild sex parties take place.
However Bill gets caught out as an interloper in the sex orgy and realises that he might have put himself in danger, especially when a prostitute in the orgy turns up dead and his piano playing friend disappears.
Bill is spurred on to confess to his wife about the dark night of his soul and his various encounters, none of which ever lead to sex.
The film is beautifully filmed in a Christmas setting that allows for a lot of festive themed lights. The film was shot in London as Kubrick who having settled in Britain never left the country.
Despite building a typical Greenwich Village street at Pinewood Studios it looked unauthentic.
There is nothing in this movie to suggest why it took so long to shoot the film. At its heart it is just an adult drama with erotic leanings and comic absurdities.
Now I know he was not known as 'One Take Kubrick' but really taking over a year to shoot the film was taking the biscuit. I once read a discussion and I think it has some validity that the reason Kubrick took so many takes was he was hoping for some kind of serendipity. A chance magical intervention that would suddenly occur which would elevate one shot from dozens of other similar ones and critics would acclaim Kubrick as some kind of wizard.
During the production two actors were replaced. Sydney Pollack replaced Harvey Keitel as Ziegler the gregarious and libertine party host. Pollack was an actor turned Oscar winning director who specialised in making cameo appearances such as the startled agent in Tootsie and the shocked doctor in Death Becomes Her.
Pollack also directed Cruise in The Firm. Pollack was right on the money as Ziegler the concerned friend but also a man with a seedy underbelly.
Jennifer Jason Leigh was replaced by Marie Richardson as Marion the bereaved daughter who impulsively kisses Bill.
The notorious orgy starts out as some kind of Roger Corman-like masked ball from The Masque of the Red Death with some kind of semi satanic rituals before descending into some laughable softcore sex scenes. Some of the over enthusiastic jiggling we get to see, well let us say the man would be slipping out a lot.
The women Kubrick hired for the sex party look rather fetching with their thongs and bare breasts. Kudos to the casting director.
Cruise's character is very passive with all that is going on around him including the kinkiness. He might had a sharp punch in the gut from his wife's careless words but Cruise does not reflect this. This must a be a directorial choice as Cruise is a lot better and a more expressive actor than say Matthew Modine or Ryan O'Neil that Kubrick had cast in his previous movies.
The whole story is too thin and stretched out for a 160 minutes run time. The film is leisurely paced. At least Kubrick pierced the mundane setting with sudden slapstick such as the escapades of the Fancy Dress Shop owner and his daughter.
Ultimately the film is about two married people who took each other for granted and failed to appreciate each other. Just look at Alice at the beginning who is peeing in the bathroom as Bill walks in and does not flinch.
At the first party thrown by Ziegler, she gets propositioned by an older man and she flirts back while Bill in turn is being playful to two English ladies which Alice sees but does nothing about.
Kubrick made fewer films as he got older. Eyes Wide Shut was his first film since 1987. Cruise and Kidman were prepared to put their successful film careers on hold to work for an auteur knowing that they could spend months making the film. It is just a shame that Kubrick went out on a whimper.