Eyes Wide Shut : Yet Another View

by Pat Holmes

t could hardly seem more appropriate that Stanley Kubrick's career as a picture-maker began as a staff photographer for a magazine called Look. In the 13 feature films he directed before his death this March at age 70, he compelled audiences to do just that. Not all of those who looked could agree on what they saw, but there was never less than a wealth of potential for both hymns of praise and cries of frustration, and virtually all would agree it was nearly impossible to look away.

The career that opened with a Look closes with Eyes Wide Shut, a film that could easily have been Kubrick's last anyway, given the increasing length of time between each film (it's been 12 years since Full Metal Jacket). Like most of its predecessors, it is certain to receive mixed reviews upon its release and just as likely to wear well over time, when it is released from the grip of ballyhoo and subsumed into Kubrick's body of work. Like the sense of contradiction embodied by those works (check some of those titles: Fear And Desire, Killer's Kiss, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut), even the hype accompanying the Eyes opening is largely inspired by Kubrick's legendary sense of secrecy, rather than the usual attempt to reveal everything about a movie before it opens. In fact, as the other anxiously-awaited movie event of the summer has confirmed, the hype itself is now the principal creation, with the movie as a kind of by-product (make that waste-product).

But there's a real movie here this time, one of the rare ones that truly qualifies for the sort of possessory credit now given to any vision-impaired hack or MTV hellspawn. This is unmistakably "A Stanley Kubrick Film," bearing the definitive stamp of one of the medium's last grand masters, one whose lack of public speech ensured with increasing rigor over the years that the work speak for itself. Kubrick not only made his own world on film; he created his own world of filmmaking, on his own turf (never far from his home outside London) and on his own terms.

The ostensible turf of Eyes Wide Shut is Manhattan and its environs, but it is more identifiably the personal landscape of Kubrick's world, filled with familiar landmarks, illuminated by that strange, uniquely pellucid light (at once dense and lucent—shining, if you like), navigated via those glacial, elegant tracking shots that draw the viewer in as their graceful precision hints at the sense of inevitability Kubrick once mentioned seeking in his work. When Dr. William Harford (Tom Cruise) takes to the New York streets following a revelatory argument with his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), it doesn't look right, even to those who have never actually set foot there, and regardless of the notorious perfectionism that had Kubrick send representatives to Greenwich Village to measure street widths. But if it doesn't feel right in real-world terms, it does in Kubrick terms and as part of the dream-world atmosphere of the film.

Coming after each of the Harfords is separately propositioned at a swank party hosted by a wealthy friend (Sidney Pollack), their argument, in which Alice recalls a sexual fantasy for which she would have sacrificed her entire life as wife and parent, so confounds William that he escapes into the night and into a series of episodes that define "strange love." A grieving woman (Marie Richardson) confesses her love for Harford, literally over her father's dead body. He is pushed around on the street by some young gay-bashing drunks, then casually and briefly lured to a hooker's apartment before visiting an old school chum (Todd Field) who works as a lounge pianist and moonlights on the organ, blindfolded, at a gargantuan orgy in the secluded splendor of Long Island. When Harford decides to crash the disturbing masked and ritualistic revelry (after renting a costume from a merchant whose trade also includes the sexual favors of his teenage daughter), Harford nearly pays for his glimpse of sexual fantasy with more than his married life.

If Kubrick hadn't given the title Fear And Desire to his first film, it would have fit his last one very neatly. Certainly those titular conditions define the fever-dream state of this film more accurately than any realistic, logical or narrative terms might. And it's Kubrick's absolute mastery of cinematic language that proves completely gripping in spite of some wobbly storytelling, as well as a few other qualms that could be either compounded or confounded by the repeat viewings any Kubrick film seems to demand and reward.

mong the feelings a repeat viewing might reinforce or belie is the sense that Eyes Wide Shut's contents are less weighty than its packaging (that is, the peerless Kubrick technique and precision). There's also the inability of that centerpiece orgy sequence, which is played more for sinister than sexual elements, to fully saturate the remainder of the film with the dread to which it appears to aspire. (In the end, for example, the deathbed scene with the desperate Richardson, a brief but riveting portrayal, packs an equal if not greater wallop.) There is in the orgy as well as in some of the other concerns and the treatment, an odd touch of something like quaintness, a dated feeling that seems like more than just an echo of the source novel's period setting (the script by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael is based on Traumnovelle—"Dream Story"—by Arthur Schnitzler, set in Vienna at the turn of the last century).

Some of these seeming difficulties are likely to recede as time passes and currency is of less concern than coherence with the rest of Kubrick's work (which is not to say the perceived problems are simply the result of post-hype syndrome). The psychic derailment undergone by Dr. Harford at the news of Alice's emotional infidelity—though part of the film's dated feeling—is very much in keeping with Kubrick's repeated theme of the failure of human beliefs and systems, ranging from the foolproof robbery plan doomed by human frailty in The Killing through the failed fail-safe system of Strangelove to the paranoid HAL 9000 computer in 2001, with variations in virtually every other film.

Not surprisingly, Cruise never really ignites the screen (also unsurprisingly, Kidman strikes more fire in considerably less screen time), but he is nonetheless in keeping with a tendency Kubrick often had for unexciting leads (Cruise is among the most asexual of supposed screen sex symbols). It's part of the enigma of the Kube, the use of an inexpressive presence in service to personal expression. The film, though, is never dull; in fact it's rarely less than captivating. This is the true indication of Kubrick's skill and power, his ability to enthrall or puzzle (sometimes both at once), but always to engage and intrigue, to provoke thought and often amazement. Kubrick was hardly the impersonal filmmaker many of his critics claimed. If anything he may have been too personal. That was part of the fascination—make that is part of the fascination—unlikely to diminish as long as we do what we were encouraged to do from the beginning—just look.

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