I'm a doctor! Have some money! (possible spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (13 June 2002)

"I'm going to watch this again to remind myself why I hated it," I told the nice boy at the video store. He laughed, being a nice boy, and told me the movie got better the more you saw it. Maybe it does. In any case, it didn't feel quite as long...
But I suppose I should be fair to the movie, although I'm sure it loses no sleep wondering whether it's been fair to me. I did get a better sense of why someone else might like this. There are some very deep, fascinating, thought-provoking things happening here. My problem is, they don't happen in the actual movie as such.
Watching Eyes Wide Shut for a second time, I was reminded of two scenes from two very different movies, both of which I liked. The first is from the Kids in the Hall movie Brain Candy. From a very swank party, our scientist hero is summoned by his boss to a room downstairs where beautiful people lounge about a swimming pool. "What is this?" he asks. "This is the real party, Chris," he is told.
The second scene is a flashback from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A random hippie is sucking spilt acid from Hunter Thompson's sleeve when a man walks in on them, and is forever convinced that just behind every men's room door, men in red sweaters are getting incredible kicks from things he'll never understand.
Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut is essentially the man who walked into the restroom. He's convinced that somewhere out there lurks the real party, and it's got something to do with sex. Sex really gets a bad rap in this movie (except maybe for marital relations in the missionary position, which are never really commented on.) It's the neo-Puritan post-HIV philosophy of our times: Sex is gonna kill ya. Didn't you see Halloween?
Of course, I'm only guessing at what's "really" going on. Nothing is horribly explicit in this movie. We assume that there are deeper levels to it, and that they are oh so very deep indeed, but it isn't so much the movie hinting at that as it is the fact that, taken at face value, this is an excruciatingly boring film. We have Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who do not have characters well-defined enough to make us think of them as anything other than Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, doing a large amount of nothing for a large amount of time. Cruise spends most of the movie walking around New York as if he were an amnesiac who'd been handed an index card: "You're a doctor. Offer people money. Try and get laid, but then again, don't." Kidman sounds like she learned to speak from listening to her seven-year-old daughter read out loud -- with long......pauses......between her...........words. Was she directed to talk that way, or was it the only way she could get through the dialogue? And why on earth do they keep their pot in a Band-Aid box? They have a daughter, what if she cuts herself? Where do they keep the Band-Aids? Rolled up in a sock?
And then comes the orgy scene. I remember how thrilled I was by it the first time. Finally, we're at the real party. It's gorgeous, and mysterious, and sinister. It's exhilarating and terrifying. It's over in ten minutes.
And Tom Cruise is still boring, still a doctor, but now he's also an amateur detective. He's gone from seeking admittance to seeking understanding. He learns secrets, and we learn secrets, but they're not really definitive, or even all that exciting. Oh, hi, it's the end of the movie. Everybody wave.
I don't hate this movie as much as I did the first time. The nice boy at the video store says he's seen it three times, and by now he "almost likes it," so maybe if I saw it twice more, say, on an airplane, or tied up during a sadomasochistic ritual, I might change my mind. It does have a few high points: the Asian guy in the blond wig, enough female nudity to choke a chicken, and, um...oh, and Alan Cumming is in it briefly. If you prefer reading between the lines to reading the actual lines you'll probably love it. I won't hold it against you.
Personally, I like to think that somewhere, ideally an abandoned mansion on Sunset Boulevard, Kubrick's inner circle is watching the real movie, which is infinitely better. I hope they're all wearing masks.