an extended gag

Rating: 7/10 (11 November 2006)

His last film - Eyes Wide Shut - starts with an iconic, Kubrick moment: framed in a doorway and with her back to us, Nicole Kidman drops her dress to the ground. She is naked but she never turns around. We never see her (assuredly) delightful body from the front.
This image - and the action of Kidman dropping her dress - is a neat and effective summary for the entire film. Eyes Wide Shut is one long tease, a tease that expertly plays with the audience's expectations (expectations which are also built up by the marketing campaign - which was completely misleading as to the film's content). Kidman's dress falls easily to the floor and the viewer is immediately primed for an erotic thrill-ride. They couldn't be more wrong. Just as Nicole never turns around, Eyes Wide Shut never allows either of its central characters (and by extension, vicariously, us) to achieve sexual gratification.
Kidman's character has a re-occurring fantasy of a sexual encounter with a sailor - a fantasy that we can be fairly safe in assuming is never consummated. Driven by a jealousy over his wife's fantasy life (and no doubt by a desire to hurt Kidman's character for the cruel things she says to him), Tom Cruise's "Dr Bill" goes on a series of escalating sexual adventures to get laid - but each time he is frustrated. He never has sex. Neither of them do during the entire movie - with each other or with strangers, thus making Kidman's last line in the film at once predictable and perfect. It is the punch-line we've been waiting for. What these over-achieving, angst-ridden, New York WASPs need to do is simply f**k.
The movie works its way to this punch-line extremely well. I understand a lot of people find the movie slow. I think this is fair comment and can be attributed to the movie's one major flaw: Tom Cruise. His performance is mannered and unbelievable. I wonder if Cruise fully appreciated the depth of the material he was working with. If he did, I saw no sense of connection between the actor and the character he was playing. Cruise - such an icon himself - is never believable as the husband driven by jealousy into more and more desperate situations. According to an interview I read, Kubrick and his co-creator came up with the surname "Harford" because Kubrick wanted a Harrison Ford-like actor for the role (ie Har & Ford). I can't help wondering if the keeping of the name is not a sly comment from the director saying "you're watching Cruise, but imagine Harrison Ford". Ford would have been a much stronger choice and I can imagine Kubrick getting a much more nuanced performance than he did from Cruise. Alas, Ford would have been a bit long in the tooth at the time of filming. Kidman, it should be said, is wonderful but she almost always is.
There is one other glaring flaw with the film - at least in the version I saw. At one point, Cruise crashes an elaborate orgy/sex-party at a mansion. It would seem in Kubrick's original, there were a number of (reasonably) graphic sex scenes. In the North American version I saw, computer generated images of party-goers were placed in front of these sex scenes. I can't help but see this as akin to someone coming along with a magic marker and running thick black lines down the film-stock. These peculiar CGI figures are noticeably out of place (I noticed them and was unaware at the time of viewing that they were computer-generated) and, more importantly, undermines the thematic impact of the scene. The key here is that Dr Bill is not engaging in the sex, he's watching. He's observing, not participating in, sexual acts that are impersonal (everyone is masked) and theatrical. We need - as audience members - to see what Halford sees, otherwise it's pretty pointless. An alternative would have to have the audience's experience replicate Halford's - in trying to see into the orgies - but to have his (and our) view blocked or frustrated. Either would have worked.
Still, this is an important film and well worth-seeing. Just think of Harrison Ford when Tom grits his teeth and shows off his cheekbones