Much Ado About Nothing

Rating: 3/10 (6 August 1999)

Stanley Kubrick's last film was one of the most eagerly awaited and mysterious movies ever made. Ever since 1996, film fans have been waiting for the "master's" final film to make it to the big screen. Although, Kubrick had other projects in mind, it was obvious that with the huge gap between each film that "Eyes Wide Shut" would be the final chapter to his career.
Kubrick had stated that this was his best film and the two stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, both said that they were blown away by the film when they first saw it. The only reason I can think of that can explain this is that the three of them were involved in this project for so long that they had convinced themselves that they were making a masterpiece.
Since "Barry Lyndon (1975)", Kubrick's films have not matched the quality of his earlier masterworks and unfortunately, Kubrick has finished his career with his weakest and most obviously flawed film.
After an intriguing and very stylish opening, "Eyes Wide Shut" simply loses all it's direction. After coming home from a high-society gathering from which both Dr. William Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice, have spent most the evening flirting, Alice tells her husband of a fantasy she once had about a man she saw, telling William that she would have given up everything, her marriage included, in order to fulfil that fantasy. This fairly unlikely and irrelevant anecdote, told with Alice's intention of keeping her husband from being over-confident about her marital fidelity, leads Dr. Harford on a bizarre and totally unbelievable walk through the streets of New York and into a sexual underworld where he himself has the opportunity to fulfil his own fantasies. A promising beginning to the movie disintegrates into an aimless and seemingly improvised story with many unnecessary scenes (Cruise's character seems to spend an eternity getting a costume for a mysterious and potentially dangerous sex orgy). Dr. Harford simply wanders from one weird character to another as the story becomes more ridiculous with a totally implausible explanation of it all being tacked on at the end. Also, the final piece of dialogue was probably one of the first things to have been written as it simply doesn't belong with what has happened before but seems to have been put there because it sounds clever and witty.
However, this IS a Kubrick film and anyone with any interest in films should see it purely for that reason. However, many people will be disappointed because Kubrick's movies are eulogised simply because he made them, "Jingle All the Way" would be acclaimed as a complex and thought-provoking masterpiece if Kubrick's name been attached to the credits.
Stanley Kubrick was one of the greatest and most naturally gifted directors of all time but unfortunately as he became more obsessive about the making of his films he seemed to lose the ability to judge whether his projects actually had a good story.
Here we have a great director working meticulously at a boring film, it's a pity he couldn't have finished on a higher note.