Colour-Coded Coda

Rating: 8/10 (22 September 1999)

Stanley Kubrick's 17th and final film as director, Eyes Wide Shut felt like his equivalent of Scorcese's "After Hours". Both relatively low-key works directed by outstanding professionals, concerning a series of interconnected and ever-more bizarre incidents that befall one man in the underside of life.
Where Kubrick's differs is that it has no thread of humour and takes a dark and regularly disturbing path. Interestingly, the action can be largely predicted by the colours used within. For longing and inactivity there is a blue hue shrouding the players. For unrestrained sexual desire and activity there are oranges and autumn reddish shades, be they the lighting or the backdrop.
In the middle of this is Cruise, spectacularly turning his back on the macho roles of "Top Gun" that have held him down for so long. There are points at the beginning of the movie where he looks a little strained, as with Kidman at the end of the film, though this can be largely put down to Kubrick's 50-100 takes, and both generally give career-best performances.
On the negative side, some of the incidental music is too instrusive, particularly the piano stabs, which seem to want to be Psycho-Jaws with bells on; though there is a neat joke that Kubrick pulls twice by having the soundtrack playing, only for Cruise to turn it down as part of a CD in the film. There is a nice use of fades to break the scenes cleanly, and scenes are sustained, though often the jump cuts are botched and the film literally jumps and crackles and one piece of film follows another. Who did the editing on this one, Edwards Scissorhands?
Ultimately, if the film gets bad press then it would be in the wake of being the arguably the most-hyped Kubrick movie, save A Clockwork Orange, and an anti-climax (no pun intended) is inevitable. After two years in production we had a right to expect a classic, and Eyes Wide Shut isn't it. Though while not scaling the heights of the aforementioned "Orange", or even living up to "2001" or "Dr. Strangelove" (how many films could?), Eyes Wide Shut is still a worthy film to enter the Kubrick canon and a worthwhile film for him to end his career on. His autumn years never produced such genius (his previous film, Full Metal Jacket, was, let's be truly honest, nothing outstanding), and Eyes Wide Shut is probably the best of his last four directoral works. One of the major problems is that it doesn't seem to have anything to say, although it's interesting how some intervention occurs every time Cruise tries to conduct extra-marital conduct, as if some moral guardian angel is watching over him. While the amount of sexual debauchery can seem far-fetched, the actual sexual act is overplayed on advance publicity and actually has very little involvement in the final product. The much-discussed "orgy" (childishly and detractingly edited for American release), is over in little over a minute, and strains towards art rather than pornography, as one would expect from Kubrick's stature.
Warning - possible spoiler ahead. The largest weakness in the movie is the sense of pointlessness at the climax. While, again like "After Hours", this film has an off-beat denouement, this one has no singing "Is that all there is?" to enforce the irony and subsequently falls flat. Almost like a game, we have followed the three big stars (Cruise-Kidman-Kubrick) through 2 hours, 39 minutes of intoxicating plotting only to find we're supposed to wake up sober and leave the theatre on the nearest exit to your right. A dissapointment, but not enough to destroy what is still a fine achievement.