Decline and fall

Rating: 3/10 (17 June 2009)

Eyes Wide Shut has some unusually eloquent and persuasive advocates and some equally eloquent and persuasive detractors.
If I gravitate towards the detractors it is because I see this movie as the culmination of a trend in Kubrick's work that had long troubled me.
Rather than attempt a detailed analysis of its strengths and weaknesses (both of which have been covered in other excellent IMDb reviews) I would merely use it as an illustration of what I see as Kubrick's principal weakness as a film-maker. He was too slow and got progressively slower.
I mean this in three senses.
Firstly, I cannot help noting that it took him just 8 years to make his first 5 features and another 35 years to make his next 5.
These later pictures all spent years in development. I doubt if this long gestation period was a good thing. If you spend too long thinking about a picture it is easy to lose track of why you wanted to make it in the first place (A.I.?) and there is always a danger that you will end up squeezing the life out of it.
Secondly, when Kubrick finally got a project into production he would take months and months to shoot it (14 months for Eyes Wide Shut). Notoriously he shot dozens of takes of every scene, constantly trying out new things. He got away with this because he used a very small crew and was very economical. His pictures may have taken an age to complete but they never went over budget.
But again, I suspect this obsessive concern with the minutiae of every shot was counter-productive. Sometimes, Kubrick couldn't see the wood for the trees. He was so focused on how each individual scene should play that he lost sight of how the picture as a whole would work with an audience. You cannot force a movie to be great just by sheer hard work and painstaking attention to detail.
Thirdly, the movies themselves are often too slow and none more so than Eyes Wide Shut.
For one thing, no movie in recent years has spent so much time just getting characters from one scene to another. When they cross a room we see every step. For example, Tom Cruise is called to the bedside of one of his patients. We see him in a taxi, tortured by thoughts of his wife with another man. Then Kubrick cuts to an empty lobby just as the elevator arrives. The door opens and Cruise walks slowly across the lobby and through another doorway. As he does so, the camera dollies to the left so we can see him pass through that door and across another room. He rings the bell of an apartment. We cut to the interior of the apartment. A maid enters from the right and walks all the way across the hall to open the door and let Cruise in. She takes his coat and they exchange a couple of words before Cruise walks across the hall and over to the bedroom door. He knocks. Next, we cut to an interior of the bedroom. The door is opened and Cruise walks in. Finally the scene begins. And this is from the man who once spanned 5 million years with a single jump cut!
This scene is not an exception. The whole movie is like that.
This is compounded by the highly stylised acting that Kubrick came to love. In this movie, people often talk in slow motion. Nicole Kidman, in particular, is often required to break each sentence down into disconnected fragments, with agonising pauses between them. This is not her normal style and must have been specifically dictated by Kubrick.
Fine - except that much of the dialogue is achingly banal and unconvincing. Tom Cruise's flirtation with the two girls at the party is feeble enough, but those lines sound like Oscar Wilde in comparison to the ones exchanged by Sky Dumont and Nicole Kidman. What was Kubrick thinking of?
This is a valid question, because he probably knew exactly what he was doing. If the dialogue is banal it was because he wanted it that way. If the pacing is funereal it is because it was part of his design for the picture. I suspect that he wanted it to play like a lucid dream. Lucid dreams seem very normal when they are happening: it is only on reflection that you realise how strange they actually were. In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick was probably aiming at an apparently realistic surface, but with subtly surrealistic undertones.
For me it didn't work. The surface is just too prosaic to hold the interest and the undertones are too studied and too calculated to be unsettling. As a result, the movie is cold and clinical when it needs to be passionate and engaged.
Ultimately, there is too much thought and too little feeling: too much technique and too little instinct.
I would draw a somewhat artificial distinction between movie artists and movie entertainers. It has nothing to do with quality: there are lousy artists and great entertainers. The difference is that artists make the movies they feel they have to make. Entertainers make the movies they feel their audiences want to see.
Unquestionably, Kubrick was an artist. He always followed his own Muse. For a long time I was happy to go along for the ride, but eventually his Muse took him to places where I couldn't follow.
From my perspective, his career after 2001: A Space Odyssey was mostly a story of decline and fall.