A Journey to Nowhere for Nothing

Rating: 4/10 (15 August 2006)

Stanley Kubrick was a genius director. There, now that you can't get me wrong, Eyes Wide Shut is quite a bloated piece of work. A married couple attends a party, leaves the party, shares a doobie, and question each other's faithfulness. After the wife (Nicole Kidman) reveals a close call of cheating and before the discussion can end, William Harford (Tom Cruise), a doctor, receives a late call to duty and must abandon his wife for the night, shaking off his high. Once the doctor leaves his home (with visions of a cheating wife in his head), he unintentionally winds up embarking on an adventure of sexcapades full of mystery, discovery, and oddities. My favorite scene is the first unexpected turn of Harford's journey (if you ask me) when a newly grieving widow makes a move on the young doc. Perhaps the problem was Kubrick was not alive to properly explain the film enough to reach critics and audiences alike, but something is missing in the final installment for the Kubrick Kollektor. For this critic, I'm not sure any explaining could save it; the film as a whole comes off as a pathetic showcase for the aging Cruise's fading acting talents. Cruise's deteriorating sanity these days probably could have been stopped if we had realized that Eyes Wide Shut and Vanilla Sky were the disguised cries for help they seem to be now (That was a joke... sort of.).