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Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Eyes Wide Shut is a confounding experience:  The story is overlong, but it’s never exactly boring.  Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman deliver some of their most impassioned work, even if their characters feel aloof and unrelatable.  Stanley Kubrick bedecks his quasi-erotic odyssey with eye-popping colors, although the New York of his fantasy rings completely false.  In the end, Eyes Wide Shut is an uneven, ungainly construction where the individual pieces can be admired while the whole machine clunks and sputters.  I’ve seen this movie many times, and it leaves me a little more frustrated with every viewing.

Loosely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Dream Story, Kubrick and co-writer Frederick Raphael modernize the story to 90s Manhattan.  Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise) and his wife Alice (Kidman), an art curator, live a charmed upper-class lifestyle.  As the movie opens, the Harfords attend a lavish Christmas party thrown by Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack).  Victor is one of those characters who I can’t tell you exactly what he does for a living, I can only tell you he must do it really well.  Bill and Alice separate and flirt their way through the party.  He finds two sauced young models, while she dances with an older Hungarian man (Sky du Mont) who walks that fine line between suave and sleazy.

In the wake of these near-infidelities, some kind of rude sexual awakening occurs within the Harfords.  The next night, they spark a late-night doob and engage in a wild, unhinged conversation that makes me think neither has ever smoked weed.  In this strange furnace of conversation, Alice lets slip that she once fantasized about a young naval officer they encountered on a trip.  Her infatuation was so intense that Alice briefly entertained the idea of leaving Bill and their young daughter (Madison Eginton) to pursue a relationship with this hunky rando.  Bill cycles through a torrent of heated emotions–jealousy, rage, humiliation.  He strikes out into the city, both to process his sudden feelings and to embark on a sexual journey of his own.

What follows is a series of bizarre, mostly self-contained vignettes.  The other characters must sense the emotional tension crackling from Dr. Bill, because they all react to him in some sexual way.  A patient’s father (Marie Richardson) professes her smoldering love for him.  Drunken frat boys bark homophobic slurs.  A costume shop owner (Rade Šerbedžija) odiously pimps his teenage daughter (Leelee Sobieski).

All those icky encounters are really just preamble for the film’s infamous centerpiece.  Bill runs into an old med-school buddy (Todd Field), who confesses that he has been hired to play piano at an opulent masquerade ball for highfalutin people.  Intensely curious, Bill finagles the location of this mysterious party, and even the password–fidelio, probably from the Beethoven opera.  With that, Bill makes the ill-fated decision to crash this powerful gathering.

What he finds is an assemblage of millionaires, billionaires, and lingerie models.  Many of them wear nothing but masks.  Some of them gyrate while others watch.  For better or worse, Bill’s appetite for sexual discovery has been sated.  Of course, this Dionysian Illuminati is well aware of Bill’s unwanted presence.  They isolate and threaten him if he investigates their party further.  Once again, Bill is an aggressively curious creature, so he immediately searches for clues.  He finds evidence of rampant drug use and possibly murder.  It soon becomes clear that this dangerous search could endanger his entire family.

Eyes Wide Shut sizzles in a very slow burn.  Two hours and forty minutes is way too long for such a lean story.  This film set the Guinness record for movie shoots–at a whopping 400 days–and it shows.  Shut feels disjointed from one sequence to the next.  Bill’s conversation with a troubled sex worker (Vinessa Shaw) sits awkwardly next the costume shop scenes, as if they were pulled from completely different movies.  (Indeed, Kubrick’s marathon shoot ran so long that multiple actors, including Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh, appeared and vanished from the production.)  On the one hand, this compartmentalized storytelling contributes to the film’s general uneasiness.  At the same time, Kubrick’s exhausting nature also makes the film lapse into incoherence.

If Shut‘s sum total is flawed, at least some of the parts are pleasing.  Cruise and Kidman offer total commitment, and bring real movie star gravitas to the lead roles.  Kubrick also builds his New York out of a dream, with millions of colors and layers of fog.  I also enjoyed the building dread of the orgy scenes, which Kubrick underlines with several plunked notes on a lone piano.  Eyes Wide Shut might not offer resounding success, but it does display a few moments of what could’ve been.

Unfortunately, most of what’s left signifies an audacious misfire.  For starters, Cruise’s arrogant, aloof doctor-stud is totally unrelatable.  That goes ditto for Kidman, whose Alice alternates between being icy, dismissive, and incomprehensibly angry.  Their rocky relationship brims with flapping red flags.  While Kubrick successfully holds interest, the Harfords offer no emotional connection whatsoever.  Their stilted final conversation, in particular, feels ported in from other planet.  After 160 minutes of plodding, Eyes Wide Shut hits the ground with a good, strong thud.

If Eyes Wide Shut is a miss, at least it’s an attractive miss.  And because Kubrick’s filmography varies widely in genre and tone, this film fits in by being totally different.  He died several days after handing in his final print, making this the swan song of a storied career.  For all these reasons, I’d still recommend  Eyes Wide Shut for film buffs.  See it once to complete Kubrick’s oeuvre, and maybe again to study why it falls so far short of his greatest work.

159 min.  R.  Amazon Video.

 

 

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