Eyes Wide Shut Rating **** Masterpiece Directed by Stanley Kubrick Written by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael With Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Marie Richardson, Madison Eginton, Todd Field, Julienne Davis, Vinessa Shaw, Rade Sherbedgia, Leelee Sobieski, and Abigail Good.
Called away by the death of a patient, Bill is haunted by images of Alice having sex with the officer, and his night and the following day and night turn into a string of adventures consisting of sexual temptations or provocations that come his way with and without his complicity–all of which prove abortive. The dreamlike interruptions and certain passing details share some of the same hallucinatory texture–as they do in Schnitzler’s story–so that even waitresses glimpsed in a diner and coffeehouse and a gay hotel desk clerk suggest sexual possibilities. The daughter (Marie Richardson) of the man who has just died is engaged to be married soon yet suddenly declares her love for Bill. Wandering the streets afterward, he’s harassed by college kids who think he’s gay (in Traumnovelle the hero is Jewish and the students anti-Semites), then picked up by a prostitute named Domino (Vinessa Shaw). He finally winds up at the Sonata Cafe, where Nick Nightingale is playing with a jazz quartet. Nick has a gig later that night as a blindfolded pianist at a costumed orgy in a country house on Long Island, and Bill, after discovering the password, persuades Nick to give him the address. He then proceeds to a costume-rental shop to acquire a tux, cloak, and mask, and takes a taxi to the house. Eventually exposed as an intruder, he fears for his life until a masked woman mysteriously offers to sacrifice herself for him.
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The climactic dialogue between Harford and Ziegler in Ziegler’s huge town house–a remarkable scene that runs a little over 13 minutes–has been getting some flack from reviewers who claim it explains too much. But it explains nothing conclusive, apart from Ziegler’s Zeus-like access and power–in a billiards room that seems to belong on Mount Olympus, like the chateau in Paths of Glory–and Harford’s ultimate remoteness from those reaches; Ziegler holds all the cards, and we and Harford hold none. Critic David Ehrenstein recently told me he thought Barry Lyndon was Kubrick’s most Jewish movie in its depiction of social exclusion, but that was before he saw Eyes Wide Shut.
There’s no such narrative breakdown in Eyes Wide Shut, which proceeds in conventional linear fashion throughout–though interludes created by a fantasy and a dream Alice recounts are every bit as important as waking events. This time the “brain” belongs to neither a single character (like HAL) nor a group (like the soldiers in Full Metal Jacket) but to a happily married couple–to their shared experience and the world created between them–and the threat of a breakdown, which forms the narrative, is eventually overcome. In this case the “identity of brain and world” is more explicit, and negotiating a relationship between the two, between dreaming and waking, is what the movie is all about. Even the title tells you that.
There are already signs that Eyes Wide Shut is dividing critics, sometimes along regional, even tribal lines. Most Chicago critics are enthusiastic, but a good many New York critics aren’t, apparently in part because the contemporary New York this movie conjures up–basically shot on sets in England, apart from a few stray second-unit shots of New York streets–isn’t their city. It’s true that Kubrick–born and raised in the Bronx but for many years an expatriate who refused to fly–didn’t go near Manhattan in the 90s, and the movie clearly reflects that. But given the highly stylized and even mannerist nature of his late work, I can’t see how this matters much. (There’s some disagreement in the press about when he last visited New York. I’m fairly certain I spotted him in Soho in 1980 around the time The Shining came out; he was sloppily dressed and was methodically tearing down a poster from a streetlamp advertising an interview with him in the Soho News.)
The film credits a lighting cameraman but no director of photography, which has led critic Kent Jones to surmise correctly that Kubrick shot most of it himself. This is personal filmmaking as well as dream poetry of the kind most movie commerce has ground underfoot, and if a better studio release comes along this year I’ll be flabbergasted.
