A shame it ruined their marriage

Rating: Null/10 (19 August 2001)

This film is like an opera, with its the classical soundtrack complementing the staged, almost balletic, ballroom party and séance scenes. It's use of suspense is not cheap, but very deliberate in its restraint: the audience does not hold its breath in anticipation of an unlikely murder but in fear lest Nicole Kidman's soliloquy should reveal a past infidelity. This is the suspense of real life, and it is powerful. Infidelity is one of the greatest fear lovers can entertain, and, as such, Kubrick does not need to elaborately assault ones pulses with anything more sensational to get an intense response from his audience.
Eyes Wide Shut is a narrative hyperbole of a couple having a fight; a modern day rendering of an ancient blame story. Eve welcomes evil into her bosom and into humanity when she decides to test Adam's love (if you love me, she suggests, you will eat the apple). Adam, the focus of the story, is innocent and unprotected. As with the Garden of Eden story, it is the woman in Kubrick's tale, with all her testing ways, that initiates sin: from the very start, the audience is made suspicious of the woman who is portrayed as the instigator of the bad feeling as she indelicately goes to the toilet while her husband is sorting out his tie.
The couple (unemployed Kidman and Dr Cruise) leave for a party where they do their social duty, separate and go mingle. Kidman goes off in her state of pent up frustration, inebriates herself on champagne and tolerates the addresses of a slimy Bulgarian who slow dances with her and whispers insinuations in her ears (like the snake whispering in Eve's ear). Yet the fact that he is too old to be any real attraction suggests that her flirtations are designed for a different end: to aggravate her husband.
She warily spots him receiving the attentions of two beautiful models while she is slow dancing, and her motives for making him jealous are thus subtly linked to her own insecurities and fears. Yet neither of them commit adultery and they go home in one piece. He kisses her, while she, with psychotic wide-eyed frustration, allows him: she is in a dangerous mood. Up until the fight the main tension - the carrot held before our noses - is the apprehension that adultery will be committed and that this couple will be destroyed. It is truly terrifying for we actually care about them and value their relationship: they seem to have a lot to loose.
In the fight scenario she gives the age old complaint that the only reason why he does not cheat on her is because he doesn't want to hurt her, not because he doesn't desire other women. He expresses the age old failure of the uninitiated male to take into account the effect other men's desire must inevitably have on her if she really is a creature that simply responds to male desire. If she simply responds to his desire, doesn't she instinctively respond to other men's desire too? These are her testing insinuations. What follows is perhaps one of the most excruciatingly tense scenes in cinematic history as we wait with baited breath as Nicole, ever so slowly (the film is tantalisingly slow), relates what seems geared towards becoming an awful confession of adultery. In fact it does not conclude like this but turns out to be a mere fantasy of adultery.
Nevertheless the damage has been done to our nerves as it has been done to the traumatised Cruise's (the film is experienced from his perspective). The fear of adultery lessens, partly because she has just committed it in her mind and partly because we loose faith in the director's control as we presume that adultery is now inevitably necessary if any more emotion is to be extracted from us. From then on one does not watch with such nerve edge tension but from a numbed blunted distance. At this point in the film the adultery carrot has been prematurely devoured. The fear of adultery has already been consummated. Indeed, another carrot is added to the plot (the fear for the characters very lives) but the old adultery carrot is still the main, if shredded, one.
After the epiphany of Kidman's fantasy, Cruise leaves. What follows that night is a bizarre chain of events for the doctor. These include gate crashing a psycho orgy séance wherein an elaborate, crime and detective plot enters the film. This plot cleverly calls into question the nature of illusion and reality: is it all the offspring of the doctor's disturbed imagination or, if real, is it pathetic (some sad aging perverts playing make believe) or sinister (some serious criminals). Kubrick, to an extent, leaves the choice up to you. I think there is more evidence for it all being a big farce: one of the main themes of the film is disguise or make believe (it is all a dream-nightmare for Cruise who's eyes are wide shut'). Cruise and the leak get out of the whole thing alive and the crucial corpse has simply died of a drugs overdose. Nevertheless the connection between fantasy/dreaming and real life is subtly merged. Playing with sex/violence (and they are synonymous when on screen) is both silly charade and serious perversion.
The sex/violence is, as in A Clockwork Orange, ritualised. This makes it not quite as violent as sex usually is on screen. The control of the act makes it dispassionate and, paradoxically, the lack of love in it makes it less violent  it is a performance. Love is the violently passionate force in this film as in life. It is Cruise and Kidman's love that is the dynamic force behind all of the terror and desire (whether true or false). There is no romantic s***e: the adultery' scenes make one sick (as they would if they had happened to you). There is no sense that betrayal is a turn on: it is a horrible nightmare world of deadened sensations, an un-sensual wallowing in unhappiness and self disgust.
The film is better than most. But despite its intelligence and originality it does suffer from the old ironic' clichés. The much overused undermining of Christmas was not particularly enlightening: yes Christmas is a family time of holiness, joy and peace and no it is not particularly shocking to discover that bad things happen at this time of year too and no it is not particularly disillusioning to discover a wholesome Christian couple worrying about adultery while keeping up a face of Christmas cheer for their child. Get over it Hollywood, really. It's not that clever.
The film verges on the pornographic  with sex scenes that are graphic, though easy to watch.