An overwhelming masterpiece, which stands not to be missed, nor misunderstood

Rating: 10/10 (22 July 1999)

It has been five days since I viewed "Eyes Wide Shut," but its drippingly-rich surrealistic imagery and haunting, gory, Ligeti score still resonate and refuse to let go. Kubrick left us with a triumphant, brilliant, provocative movie deserving not only high praise, but serious, ruminative thought by all those who see it.
There are other fine films with excellent acting, strong scripts and magnificent direction which cannot raise in me the ardor of "Eyes." It is the manifold layered complexity of this movie, the interwoven nuance, which I find so compelling.
The title "Eyes Wide Shut" is not only a telling description of the protagonists' condition - it is also a taunt to moviegoers too meek or superficially inclined to open their irises and observe what is really going in this film.
The movie begins in the cut-and-dry, black and white world of "reality" (which is really just an idealized dream) and progresses into the many-hued surreality of what is, in actuality, reality (hmmm). Directing one's attention to Kubrick's use of the colors red and blue (and the rainbow interposed betwixt these spectral limits) yields important clues to the film's content.
When Bill enters the rainbow (escorted into it by those catty red and blue cloaked models) he begins, slowly by slowly, to open his eyes. Things are no longer what they seem. His close friend reveals himself to be a wanton profligate, a beautiful woman, in a state of drug-induced catatonia, seems endeavored to pursue her own destruction, and his own wife of nine years admits to being beset by a gnawing extramarital desire.
Frightened and somewhat naive, Bill bumbles and stumbles into the rainbow. Here begins to see clearly, for the first time, death, destruction, evil and the superposition of ironic extremes - in other words the chromatic dissonance of human reality.
Through the misadventures of everyman Bill Harford, Kubrick's dazzlingly rendered rainbow challenges viewers to unmask and examine their own obscured desires, and through this process, to keep their eyes wide open.