Stanley Kubrick was the one director to have only directed masterpieces: the more you think about this deceptive film, the more this might be still true.

Rating: 8/10 (13 September 1999)

For the first half of this film I was reeling in disbelieving dismay. What had happened to the great Stanley Kubrick, along with Peckinpah and Burton the great American director of the last forty years? The old style now lacked any life, lapsing into cod-Felliniisms (sic?); the story was without any real interest; and where the hell was Nicole Kidman when we needed her?
Then I realised how wrong I had been. Many critics have noted, in surprise, how faithful the film is to Schnitzler's trite novella. This is, I believe, where they were misled. Only on a superficial level can it truly be called a faithful adaptation. EYES WIDE SHUT can only be properly appreciated as a Kubrick film. It's not really an examination of marriage or psychoanalysis, as is the book. Like LOLITA, 2001, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, BARRY LYNDON and THE SHINING - it concerns the gradual disintegration of a hero who began the movie whole, confident and self-satisfied.
In this way, the most helpful references might not be to Freud, but Nabokov and, perhaps bizarrely, Eric Rohmer. Like Nabokov, especially in Lolita, the assured faith in witness of the hero is constantly undermined. Unlike the novel, in which Fridolin's peregrinations are unambiguously dreamlike (its title translates as Dream Story), Kubrick takes care to establish the superficial reality of Bill's adventures. As these go on, though, coincidences, correspondances, nagging implausibilities and absurdities begin to undermine this reality.
The film, like Lolita, is impossibly symmetrical - the first two important scenes (Bill with his family; Bill in a crisis moment with Zeigler)exactly match the last two scenes (except for Bill's power in them); and there is an elegant patterning and repetition throughout. The ludicrous, Victorian, 'motivation' of a novel called Dream Story is completely weeded out, and characters are reduced to ciphers, as is appropriate to a dream.
This is where Rohmer comes in. His films, on a superficial level, concern bright young things talking talking talking about sex and philosophy, but his use of colour, framing and allusion (paintings, books, films, songs etc.) tell a completely different story. Similarly here. The crucial sequence is the opening party at Ziegler's. Everything in Bill's 'dream' that follows springs from this. For instance, the models that invite Bill for a menage-a-trois promise him a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow: in his plot, the costume shop he visits is called Rainbow.
Most important is the scene with Ziegler in the bathroom. For a start, the room is covered in mirrors. On one level is a naked, possibly dead, girl on an armchair; on another is a painting of a sprawling naked woman (I thought it was by Matisse, but I couldn't find it when I looked it up later). Already slightly drunk, and aroused after the models, can you imagine the effect of these two naked women multiply reflected in all those mirrors must have on Bill? This mixture of profuse nudity, and fear of death, ring throughout his 'dream'.
Secondly, the rich red of the painting echoes throughout Bill's adventures, colouring everything unrealistically, especially the orgy scene, and Ziegler's billiards room, completely undermining the latter's 'explanation'. This is a wonderful scene, completely misunderstood by Kubrick devotee Michael Dwyer.
The film operates as an Oedipal story in reverse. In (simplistic) Freudian terms, to enter into society, a man must symbolically kill his father and marry a mother substitute. This Bill utterly fails to do. Ziegler is the father figure here, and Bill at the opening is forced to confront his father, having just completed the primal scene. His subsequent attempts throughout the film, to 'marry' this 'mother' result only in her death, and Ziegler's increased superiority. As a son grows older, he is supposed to see flaws in his father, see that he doesn't have the answers to everything. But in the billiards room scene, Ziegler CAN answer everything, he is total control, like a father correcting an errant child.
Bill ends the film reduced to the childlike level of his daughter, in tears, totally dependent on, and at the mercy of, his wife ('mother'). If this is optimistic, as everyone has been claiming, than I'm Stanley Kubrick. Obviously not everything here fits - one would hope not, and I have only seen the film once, so give me a break. The emphasis on the hero at the expense of the heroine might seem misogynistic, but that would be to miss the point of the film's deconstruction.
One of the film's structural motifs is storytelling. Foucault once linked epistomology and sex, and here almost every character has a story to tell, a way of controlling and shaping experience. Everyone except Bill, who must find his own story (linked to his having sex). However he keeps being waylaid by others' (especially his wife's), and his own 'conclusion' (Ziegler's explanation) does the opposite of what he had hoped: it emasculates and infantilises him.
On a simply entertainment level, EYES WIDE SHUT is a joy. As I've said elsewhere, it's been an atrocious year for cinema, so it's enrapturing to see a genuine master in mature, if not absolutely outstanding, form. Kubrick's famous tracking shots, besides being so aesthetically breathtaking in themselves, create a real sense of the steady ground moving from under the characters' feet, slowly slipping away. The film is very VERY funny, especially in its use of doomladen piano music in the orgy scene and after in Bill's head whenever a crisis point occurs (the orgy should not be taken as literal and 'daring', but as a centring of the signifiers and anxieties whirring in Bill's head), as well as the mocking insertion of old favorites such as 'Strangers In The Night'. Shostakovitch's glorious Waltz from Jazz Suite No. 2, the film's musical motif, is gorgeously evocative, as well as being, appropriately, a parodic pastiche (and impossible to get out of your head).
The scenes between Kidman and Cruise are remarkable and painful; one never had Kubrick down as such a perceptive artist of domestic comedy (although THE SHINING should have been a clue). Nicole Kidman is truly brilliant in a difficult role, but Tom Cruise is strangely perfect, his smug persona wonderfully sent up (see especially the scene where he gives the prosititute/student 'compensation'), his eventual reduction after his confession to a little boy truly convincing.
Since A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Kubrick films have invariably received initially unfavorable reviews, only for subsequent viewings to reveal them as astonishing masterworks (BARRY LYNDON and THE SHINING are the pinnacles of modern cinema). I would not be remotely surprised if the same thing happened with this film.