Shrouded Treat of a Coy Gay Man's Odyssey!

Rating: Null/10 (12 September 2002)

Delightful, if lugubrious, motion picture is so chock full of symbolism -- or so it would seem -- that the critics got tangled up, confused, and missed the big pic. Tom Cruise is Kubrick's "A-Gay" doctor, the kind of clean, prissy, masculine, smoldering -- and here's the point: -- urban homosexual who, succesful and glimpsing into the old-boys' decadence of privilege in the big city, gets the itch to see the rest of things. It's that urge we have to feel into our fathers' shoes, a big fat Freudian sex symbol.
Anyhoo, "Eyes Wide Shut" is so fun to watch -- G*d only knows all the anguish some viewers got in their guts watching it, because Kubrick fully employs his now toungue-in-cheek style of existential doom and sobriety like so many lights on the Christmas trees in the film. Let it go, he says in this story, and feast on something as unsettling as a guy wanting sex, AIDS, buggery, lies, overdoses, anything that his partner can't have, or because the partner wants it!
Nicole Kidman, as the partner, deliver's one of Gaydom's hottest contemporary fantasies, the naval officer. (Remember Richard Gere in "Officer..."?) The partner is an underused psychosexual term for one's wife or boyfriend or lover, who, in their efforts to integrate in relationship, unwittingly offer chances to be undermined as an individual. As with most of Kubrick's films, there is plenty of time to think about it amid the strangely grained visuals. It's like the deliberately muffled dialogue in "Alien" in reverse: Think and listen rather than view. Let the visuals lull you to think. A fun and intelligent story, like "Eloise" at the Plaza Hotel. Cruise, like Jodie Foster, is a well-thought-out careerist. Their movies flow through their lives like a logistics system. How's THAT for working the system?
Relax and enjoy a perverse and easy fable!