Eyes
Wide Shut
Rated
R
Now playing
In the world of Stanley Kubrick, reality and illusion progress
on distinct planes. Where they intersect, things become complicated.
The late director's characters are plunged into nightmares
of cold peculiarity that threaten our idea of what's real
and underscore the illusoriness of order. The systems set
up to make our universe more rational and safe are not always
real themselves. Whether he was depicting a war room run by
wackos in Dr. Strangelove, explosive violence in an
Orwellian future in A Clockwork Orange, the siren call
of insanity in The Shining, or a hyper-real Vietnam
War in Full Metal Jacket, life in Kubrick's cinematic
universe is a surreal work in progress--an ambiguous joke
that veers from hilarity to terror in two seconds.
In Eyes Wide Shut, the director once again takes
on the perplexing nature of dreams and reality, this time
exploring them in a more personal and private arena: sexuality.
As he did with the brilliant Lolita, Kubrick makes
more than a film about sexual desire; he makes a film about
bitter romance, troublesome marital bonds, societal contradictions
and, significantly, the fear of death. An updating of the
1927 Traumnovelle (Dream Novel) by Arthur Schnitzler,
an Austrian writer whose deeply psychological work resembled
Freud's, the film is an unsettling blend of antiquated garishness
and modern transgression--a sexual alternate universe haunted
by ghouls of the past, present and future.
The healthy, handsome walking dead here are Dr. Bill Harford
(an impressive, ever-maturing Tom Cruise) and his wife,
Alice (Nicole Kidman), a glamorous couple who appear the
picture of storybook perfection. But there are cracks in
the portrait. At a sumptuous party given by Bill's friend
Victor (Sydney Pollack), Bill almost strays upstairs with
two models and Alice flirts with a bizarre Hungarian man
who looks like one of the cadaverous partygoers from The
Shining. The next evening, in a fit of jealousy over
Bill's indiscretion, Alice confesses that she has thought
about cheating and, even worse, reveals that if things had
been different, she would have thrown her entire life away
for one flight of sexual fancy. Unmasking something that
would usually remain a deep, dark secret, Alice deftly rattles
Bill's perception of her fidelity and the strength of their
marriage. (Kidman's performance here is superb.) Soon, Bill
is abruptly called away to confirm the death of a patient,
and after the daughter of the deceased makes an enormous
pass at him, he decides not to immediately return home.
Instead, he wanders the streets of New York and embarks
on a sequence of actions that, though not as comic, resemble
those in the Scorsese movie After Hours: He discovers
a surreal sexual underworld that he is both attracted to
and repelled by.
A prostitute, a piano player, a weird costume-store owner
and his Lolita-esque 14-year-old whore daughter lead Bill
to the film's already-famous ritualistic orgy sequence,
during which participants are cloaked and grotesquely masked,
and naked women are used as sacrificial sex lambs. The gothic,
terrifying yet titillating feel of this sequence walks a
fine line between horror and parody but never crosses into
either. The magnificent, exacting camera work and unrelenting
music compel us to look, no matter what happens. Though
our eyes are not forcibly opened like Alex's in A Clockwork
Orange, we are hypnotized, seemingly against our will.
Kubrick once again underscores that cinema is a form of
waking dream that can be invested with multiple meanings.
Are Bill's encounters simply nightmares that will damage
his marriage beyond repair, or are they mere titillating
fantasy--fodder for a closer relationship and better sex
with his spouse? Hard to say. Given the film's ominous tone,
however, there is something definitely rotten within its
slinky, Christmas-lit loveliness. Like the impeccable environment
of The Shining, the aura of Eyes Wide Shut
is one of beauty ready to be defiled, sexuality ready to
be slaughtered, lovely exteriors that reek of formaldehyde.
The pall that hangs over this picture is fear: fear of the
unknown; fear of oneself or of others; and fear that sex
leads either to death or ultimate freedom. The film can
be viewed as a commentary on sexual attitudes in this decade--a
time when meaningless indiscretions can lead to horrifying
blood-test results. It is no surprise, then, that Bill is
a doctor; throughout the film, he flashes his physician's
ID as a police detective would his badge. "I'm a doctor,"
he constantly says, for both reassurance and intimidation.
In a profession that requires intimate investigation of
flesh that may well be on its way to the morgue, sex is
serious. These unsettling references to necrophilia and
forbidden sex (not to mention Kubrick's own death upon bringing
the film to completion, une petite mort of sorts)
permeate the picture like one giant prick tease. In today's
world, sex is still there for the taking, but at what cost
and for what gain? Kubrick's frustrating, brilliant coda
neither answers nor ignores its own questions. Rather it
leaves us in a mysterious, contradictory mishmash of dream
and reality, where not only are our eyes wide shut, but
our legs are too.
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Willamette Week | originally
published July 21, 1999
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