Good Movie, Poor Adaptation

Rating: Null/10 (16 March 2001)

While I feel that Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut is a good movie (although it falls short of such classics as Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange), I feel that it is a poor adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's short novel Traumnovelle. While I feel Eyes Wide Shut captures the sexual aspects of the novel quite well, I feel it fails to build upon one of the themes of the novel--the juxtaposition of dream and reality. I think this failure could be due to two factors. The first is moving the novel's setting of Vienna around the Twenties to New York City in the 1990s. For viewers watching the movie in the late Twentieth and early Twenty First centuries this can have the affect of making the movie's events seem more real and hence distancing them from the dreams discussed in the film. The second is what I perceive as Kubrick's failure to capitalize on the dreams related in Traumnovelle. Indeed, rather than simply having the characters more or less tell us about some of the dreams, he could have shown some of us the dreams (this is film, after all). In this way he could have taken advantage of one of the idea contained within the novel--the relationship of dreams to reality.
Regardless, Eyes Wide Shut is a must see movie, particularly for Kubrick fans. It is a disturbing journey through human sexuality, all done without judging the characters or pulling any punches. Although not up to some of Kubrick's earlier works (let's face it, they are hard acts to follow!), Eyes Wide Shut is a very interesting work.