......but keep your mind wide open.

Rating: 7/10 (21 October 2009)

There's a scene in Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, in which the lead feels he is being followed by an unruly and somewhat antagonistic force down a public street. The setting is the night; the location is a usually bustling city and the happenings within the frame capture what's at stake for these people. A certain Dr. William Harford (Cruise) stands by a stand selling items; his surveyor at the end of the street, keeping a watchful eye on the good doctor, whilst himself perched between two very distinct locales: a large, welcoming restaurant and a sex shop displaying the latest in lingerie. In a very basic sense, and given what Harford knows at this point about the stalker, the two locales the follower stands between represent Harford's predicament: carrying on with what you're doing and keeping quiet equates in being able to carry on in life, best represented by the restaurant offering food, or 'life' - indeed salvation. The alternative is the sex shop across the road, the option to quash one's guilt about what happened at the mansion and spill the beans on what he saw and was told would happen. We are led that the repercussions, however, would equate in pain for William and his family; possibly even death.
In one sequence lasting about fifteen seconds but running on some previous material, the film manages to touch on ideas of guilt and sex as a weapon or as a piece of blackmail whilst incorporating a certain sense of horror and adding to what was, up to this point, feeling like a suburban drama of some description. The brief shift in mood has us momentarily frightened, that a force we were not expecting in this 'type' of film does indeed exist, and possesses an ability to harm. Kubrick's final film, 1999's Eyes Wide Shut, seems to be a mediation on sexuality and the urge to further sexual ventures. Like Polanski's Bitter Moon before it, the film is about a male lead attempting to further his sexual horizons; with the hitch that he is running on ego and lust more-so a slower and more natural sensation which demands he should try new things in his own time.
William has a wife named Alice (Kidman), and they have one very young daughter. They dress extravagantly, play classical music as they get ready for nights out and they attend functions that embrace public holidays and display works of art, all in the metropolis that is New York City. I'm not sure if saying that the film "isn't really about them as a couple" is entirely correct, although you will not come away from the film with the nourishing sense of accomplishment born out of their relationship-come-marriage. Essentially, the film is a circular journey for Bill; beginning and immediately ending with head on and frank interaction with his wife. More-so for me, the film is purely about the male, in this case the husband, Bill. The spark that lights his fuse and refrains it from burning out is talk with Alice about how she once felt for a Naval officer many years ago, something that is intensified when his conflicting feelings clash following a call-out to a patients house. Prior to hearing Alice's story, Bill actively flirts with two young models at the function whereas at the home of a woman's dead father, post-conversation, Bill talks and interacts with said woman but turns down any advances.
For all the shops selling lingerie; the naked lead characters and for all the nudity and fetishistic animal masks that come with that particular segment, the film is exceedingly un-erotic or 'un-titalating'. Why? Because there is a certain danger linked to these things: the already established sex shop is iconographically on one 'side' of the road in which the lead could cross, but it would spell disaster; the naked women lying motionless in a recreational room is there because of a drug overdose while the outrageous sequence of several naked bodies wandering around a large house and having intercourse over a soundtrack of odd chanting instills fear more than anything else born out of the fact that we, the lead character, should not be there – and are in grave danger.
Bill's further descent is emphasised when a group of young men call into question his sexuality, accusing him of looking like a homosexual and when his stumbling into a jazz club and an interaction with a musician he's known of for years going back to medical school prods things along, there's no going back upon hearing of a strange place in which strange goings on occur. The film works well and stands up to Kubrick's prior work, with the entire de-robing sequence being able to be placed on that mantle with any other 'out there' sequence from Kubrick's work: scenes such as Slim Pickens' riding of the atomic bomb and the visionary sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey as the lead journeys to where only very few, if any, have ever been before.
Eyes Wide Shut is an accomplished film; a piece that carries dramatic weight and retains its focus and guile. The film is frightening, but it is the nature of human beings that scares us the most in the picture; and those with such carefree attitudes to sexual goings on around them: the owner of a clothes shop regarding what he can do with his daughter and a certain Victor Ziegler (Pollack), who knows why naked women got to be how they are at his place but shows no real compassion to them: they are to be used and disregarded if they step out of line. This was certainly no shameful departure for Kubrick.