Vale Stanley

Rating: 7/10 (8 August 1999)

Was Kubrick a maker of popular Hollywood films who masqueraded as an art film auteur, or a giant of the cinema who liked to break even on a picture? This one certainly indicates he liked to do things his way, but it is an entertaining film nevertheless, despite the length (160 minutes) and the stately pace.
I think Kubrick's widow Christine got it right when she said "Eyes Wide Shut" is about fear. In this case it is the fear that one is missing out on something forbidden but delicious, or perhaps the fear that one has failed to achieve true fulfillment despite all the conventional trappings of success. Dr Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) has it all - society practice, luxurious Manhattan apartment, Range Rover, beautiful attentive art curator wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) and cute small daughter. Bill is motivated to find what he's missed by Alice's confession that she had been prepared to give him and everything else up for a handsome naval officer she merely saw across a crowded room at a resort months ago. Fueled by mental images of Alice cavorting with the officer, Bill goes out to find whatever it was he's missed. The journey is an interesting one with Kubrick doing his usual stringing together of set pieces/cameos to reach a rather maudlin but vaguely cheerful conclusion. The unjustly notorious orgy scene is absurd rather than erotic but some of the scenes between Bill and Alice are as intimate as one gets in cinema.
Kubrick was like Hitchcock in using detail to telling effect, though unlike Kubrick, Hitchcock knew when to stop. Tom Cruise breaks down and cries at one stage, probably because Stanley had asked him to do the scene for the 101st time. The detail is truly extraordinary. Just one example. In the opening scene, Alice is naked in front of a mirror above her dressing table and Bill, also naked, moves to caress her. On the dressing table are a few books. On the top is Alan Bullock's biography of Hitler and Stalin. A conventional enough tome to find as a young NYC doctor's bedside reading. The next book down is a biography of (the still living) Lord Longford. Lord Longford? He was the eccentric peer who launched a futile campaign against pornography in Britain in the early 1960s including among his targets Kubrick's film of Lolita. This reference is in the only mildly erotic scene in the whole film. A Lolita-like character makes a brief appearance later on and the angle offered will not amuse the politically correct, or Lord Longford, if he is still watching.
Detail is used for dramatic effect, not realism. Thus Bill gets on the Interstate to get to the country estate where the orgy is being held and winds up in England. Stanley plays fast and loose with the locations. The exterior is Mentmore in Buckinghamshire, built by the Rothschilds, some of the interior is Highclere in Hampshire, another fantastic Victorian pile, and the orgy scene is set in a Moorish style room in Elveden, the Guinness family mansion in Suffolk.
The plot doesn't bear close examination but the script is workmanlike and the minor performances enjoyable. You can see why actors liked to work with Kubrick despite his reputation for inordinate pains - he always gave the bit players a scene to steal (with Peter Sellars in "Dr Strangelove" being a multiple offender).
As for the leads, Tom Cruise ("it's OK, I'm a doctor"), although playing the character we see the film through, doesn't quite project a personality the audience can relate to - somehow it's hard to empathise with him and his obsession. Nicole Kidman is fine - yes of course she can act. She is particularly good early on, at a posh party, fending off while sloshed an oily would-be lover. Sydney Pollack as Victor, their wealthy and sleazy friend, is a standout also.
Well, that's Kubrick. His older films stand up amazingly well (eg "Paths of Glory", "Dr Strangelove"). He was one of the few eccentric individualists of the cinema who actually did their best work on their own. With this film, he went out on a strong note, and I'm sure I'll enjoy a second viewing almost as much as the first.