Should have been buried along with Stanley Kubrick

Rating: Null/10 (21 February 2000)

Some reviewer (I forget now who) once said of Kubrick that "he wants us to respond not to the story or the characters, but to his artistry." If that's your bag, there's much in Eyes Wide Shut to respond to: the beautiful precision of the tracking shots, the gorgeous lighting (almost always from a natural source, like candles or Christmas lights), the rich cinematography,. . basically, all the things Kubrick has already been well admired for in the past. But all at the service of what, exactly? The only depth on display in this movie is in the color scheme. The story is incoherent and downright embarrassing, and Cruise is all wrong as the protagonist. Nicolle Kidman fares somewhat better, as she gets some tour-de-force monologues (which she pulls off quite well) and then is pushed aside for most of the picture, where all the slipshod plotting takes place. Actually, "plotting" is far too generous a term. Things happen - but that's about the only relation this movie has to an actual "plot." Even so, I could see myself enjoying it as an elaborate dream in another director's hands - say, Coppola's, or Lars von Trier's, even (maybe especially) Ken Russel's, someone with a more sensuous or enveloping visual style. But Kubrick has always been far too clinical for that - his images, no matter how stunning or well-lit, are always relentlessly flat and literal; they carry no meaning or suggestiveness beyond their rather prosaic surfaces. As such, the "orgy" scene in this movie (to take just one example) doesn't play like a bizarre hallucination, but rather as documentary footage, which forces you to ask immediately "Who exactly has orgies like this?!" no doubt breaking the mood Kubrick is at pains to set. In the theater where I saw it, laughter was the overwhelming response to this scene, not enraptured awe.
But at least that scene kept your interest (if only to see how embarrassingly over the edge Kubrick was going to go), which is more than can be said for a whole slew of others, such as the ones between Cruise and two separate prostitutes, the one in the costume shop, and most especially the one at the climax of the movie between Cruise and Sydney Pollack. The flat-footedness of the direction and acting in these scenes is truly astonishing for a mainstream motion picture, not to mention one made by a supposed "master": moments are drawn out endlessly, pauses exist that you could drive a truck through, and each scene's reason for being is highly suspect. Of course, if you're going to get into reasons for being, you'd pretty much have to throw out this entire movie. Which is exactly what I recommend that you do.
I have a special category of film which I describe as "'Neighbors' Bad" - in honor of the 1981 John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd comedy. Briefly put, it is one (quoting from my own IMDb review of that movie) "whose plot is almost indecipherable, whose events and characterizations are completely random, and again and again frustrates any expectation at arriving at any sort of meaningful conclusion, even a silly one." Without a doubt, Eyes Wide Shut fits the description to a tee - it is truly Neighbors Bad.