The disappointment of a lifetime.

Rating: 2/10 (20 August 1999)

I don't think I ever anticipated a film so much in my life, seeing as how I think Kubrick is the greatest of all directors and it had been twelve long years since his last feature. Imagine my surprise--make that shock--after two-and-a-half hours in a dark theatre, stunned to find out that 'Eyes Wide Shut' was not only a disappointment, but a total failure as a film.
What's more, the depth and breadth of this fiasco is amazing. Virtually none of the elements that made Kubrick's films such a joy to watch in the past are present here. In his greatest films, almost every shot gave the viewer something glorious, or at least interesting, to watch. There's none of that in this film. Kubrick's use of music in his other movies has always been smart, and sometimes even revolutionary. Here it's just one more mediocre element in an at best mundane production, epitomized by the single, hammered piano note that is so ineffectively used in scenes to supposedly denote tension. The slow, deliberate pace of his movies that had served him so well before just invites boredom here.
The most offending elements, though, are the story and script. Perhaps Arthur Schnitzler's story 'Traumnovelle' said something relevant to its audience earlier in the century; I don't know, I haven't read it. But this adaptation doesn't have much relevance at all to an audience at the end of that century. What's worse is the script, co-written by the great man himself. The dialog here is so trite and mediocre at times that I believe most first-year film students would have rejected it as just too hackneyed. ("You must leave at once! You are in great danger!" Did I really hear that?)
Trouble signs appeared to me early on. After the party scene where a suddenly inebriated Nicloe Kidman inexplicably almost falls for some man about 30 years older than her using hoary pick-up lines, she and husband Tom Cruise go home and have a conversation/argument about jealousy, desire and fidelity. She tells him dramatically about how she almost threw away her marriage and family just to satisfy a momentary lust. By the time these two scenes are over we've been listening to Kidman drawl out her lines for about 45 minutes and I came to the awful realization that this confessional was supposed to be the impetus for the rest of the action. This scene also contains an embarrassingly phony laughing fit by Kidman. I would accuse her of bad acting, but given the knowledge of the way Kubrick worked, this must be the way he wanted the scene to go.
Driven by a jealous vision of his wife making love to another man, Cruise sets out on an "odyssey" that takes him all over New York for a series of meaningless encounters with various characters in which virtually nothing happens. If there was a point to all this empty activity, that would have been one thing, but this story is too weak to support any kind of a moral. A reference to HIV which comes late in the movie is jarring, because it has some relation to the real world which, up to that point, had been almost totally lacking. Of course, there was no danger of anyone contracting it, since there is little sex or passion in this film about sexual obsession. Even the notorious "orgy" scene (for lack of a better word) will not raise an eyebrow of most viewers in 1999, a sign that Kubrick was out of touch with his audience and their level of sophistication after being isolated for so many years. In his defense, it may be that the scene would have been more effective if it had been shown the way he originally shot it.
So what happened? Well, as just noted, perhaps Kubrick had simply been away from filmmaking too long and his instincts weren't sharp anymore. Also it's doubtful that anyone would suggest to this acknowledged genius that something just wasn't working this time around. Whatever the reason I found this a sad ending to a brilliant career, but one that won't tarnish the overall legacy of the man. It's often been said that if Kubrick had only directed '2001: A Space Odyssey,' he'd still be remembered as a genius. Now I believe it can be said that Stanley Kubrick was a filmmaking genius even though he directed 'Eyes Wide Shut.'