Curious, unsatisfying and half and hour too long

Rating: Null/10 (23 December 2000)

I am huge Kubrick fan. I haven't seen everything he's made but the films I have seen - Lolita, Clockwork Orange and Dr Strangelove in particular - have left a deep impression on me. He seems willing to tackle subjects no one else will touch, and the results are always mesmerising. For this reason, I was really excited when Eyes Wide Shut came out, as it was his last film and dealt with another difficult subject - marital jealousy and infidelity.

Perhaps my expectations were too high. The first time I saw it (at the cinema on its release), I thought it was interesting, if slightly dissatisfying. I liked the way the streets of New York became a netherworld for Tom Cruise's fraught, jealous consciousness. I was fascinated by the way sex was on display and on sale everywhere, particularly in the curious and disturbing sequence in the fancy dress hire shop. The film didn't hold together for me, but I remember leaving the cinema impressed and thoughtful - and contemplating the film for several days after.
When revisiting the film on DVD, I found it less interesting and frustratingly slow. Tom Cruise's performance is unnatural and unconvincing - he doesn't have the range in his facial and vocal expressions to carry off such a tough part, and he falters with the weight of the film on his shoulders. Nicole Kidman is better but even she struggles to put across the highly stylised dialogue in a convincing way. This is particularly painful when she is dancing with the "mysterious" Hungarian (a hideous cliche of central European charm, grafted warts and all from bad 70s soft porn). She is best when ranting at Cruise in the scene where she confesses the temptation which drives the film forward.
The biggest problem with the film is its pace. There are so many scenes of Cruise stuggling to come to terms with the temptations around him (particularly the one his wife confesses to) and he just doesn't have the depth or range to carry such a lot of chin-stroking angst. The set pieces, such as the one with the whore or the orgy itself, are okay and hang together reasonably well - but there's just too much pontificating in between. The most effective scene remains the one with gorgeous Leelee Sobieski as the teenage nymphet having a secret party with two Japanese men in her father's shop. In this scene Kubrick seems to be showing us a world gone mad, in which parents will pimp their children and only pretend they are doing anything else for a "respectable" customer. Sobieski is incredible as the little girl, sweet-looking but incredibly sexy at the same time, whispering something into Tom Cruise's ear which we will never hear.

Interesting though this scene is, it also reinforces one of the film's biggest drawbacks - its profound and (occasionally) painful misogyny. The women in the film are sex objects of a very particular sort, drawn straight out of Schnitzer's neurotic Freudian 1930s novel and dumped into the middle of Manhattan. In the context of 1930s Vienna, a place at once sexually charged and highly repressed, these kinds of characters at least made a modicum of sense - in 1990s New York they make little or none. Also, by showing New York's melting pot of cultures through a host of first generation immigrant characters, is Kubrick suggesting that this cultural diversity has led to the sexual confusion of the modern world? One suspects not - he was from immigrant stock himself - but it seems that this is one of the subtexts of the novel; perhaps there is an unconscious trace of self-loathing in Kubrick's film which he could not see because he was so close to the project for so long (and died before it was released).
There are so many problems with this film that I'm sure it will continue to be viewed with curiousity and confusion by audiences for many years to come. It is something of a shame that Kubrick's last film should be his least satisfying and also one which suggests that he died without understanding or really liking women.