Sad but true

Rating: 6/10 (23 July 2000)

Stanley Kubrick never made a film that wasn't a masterpiece. True, the gaps between pictures became longer and longer with every release. But consider the idealistic changes he negotiated and plotted for twenty years before Scorcese made MEAN STREETS. Remember that Coppola's star only shone for a decade between THE GODFATHER and RUMBLE FISH, and Friedkin's even less. A tortured perfectionist, the twelve-year hiatus since FULL METAL JACKET further and further increased expectation for EYES WIDE SHUT.
If I delayed in delivering the `ButÂ…' part of the review, it's because it's almost impossible to give EYES WIDE SHUT the thumbs down immediately. Part of the heart desperately wants to enjoy it, the remainder begs to understand it. After two viewings and still finding I could do neither, I had to face the facts. EYES WIDE SHUT starts with a real sense of direction, but ends up going absolutely nowhere.
True, Kubrick never minded slow-revealing narratives (best example BARRY LYNDON) which belong to an altogether different period of cinema. That would be easier to accept if the film did not burst to life with the energy and sense of dark humour that made A CLOCKWORK ORANGE tick. After nearly an hour of hypnotic, considered filmmaking, it just stops dead in its tracks.
You find yourself pondering little blunders like Nicole and Tom's embarrassing effort at playing stoned, flaws which take on huge significance when you consider how trying the director was on his stars to get his vision across. If it is true that Kubrick demanded Cruise cross a road 90 times to `get the feel', you can play a guessing game, trying to pick which scene drove the star crazy. It has to be said, he crosses roads okay, but Cruise looks helpless most of the time.
It seems that in the end, Kubrick's paranoia and neurosis crippled him where it really hurt. After being a slave to cinema - at the expense of the outside world - for the last two decades of his life, his final work fails to do justice, not to the hype (which was always an effective ploy) but to the great mans legacy. You can't help but feel sorry that such a badly-paced film is a poor epitaph. After a decade spent bringing it to the screen, EYES WIDE SHUT will go down as disappointing coda.