Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Eyes Wide Shut, the last of Stanley Kubrick’s films, is a film that I found very difficult to get into. Admittedly, I am not much of a Kubrick fan. The Shining and Full Metal Jacket are the only two of his films that I have willingly watched more than once. I actively abhor 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange is just weird and disturbing to me. I tried watching Eyes Wide Shut probably three or four different times over the years, getting bored before too long every previous time. All that being said, no two of Kubrick’s films are alike, so I didn’t try watching this for the very first times when it was initially available on cable or DVD because it is a Kubrick film; I did so because I genuinely like Tom Cruise’s work as an actor and the subject matter was compelling. The end result? I did not like this film at all.
Eyes Wide Shut spends the majority of its time on not much of a story. Cruise’s character, Dr. Bill Harford and his wife Alice, played by Nicole Kidman, are a well-to-do couple living in Manhattan with their young daughter. We meet them as they are getting ready to leave for a holiday party at the home of one of Bill’s patients. From the first scene, it seems as if Kubrick is trying to give us a peek inside the inner workings of this marriage and wants to sell us on the notion that Cruise and Kidman, as Bill and Alice, are approachable people, who run around getting their kid set up with the sitter and even pee in each other’s presence, they are so normal! Don’t you relate to them?? Actually, no I don’t. From the very beginning, everything these characters did felt forced and unnatural. Cruise and Kidman had ZERO chemistry and their performances felt stiff, as if they were ACTING the entire time, rather than being the real people with a real problem that the film wants us to think they are. If something amazing or interesting had come from this, then the film would have been successful, but nothing came from it, so this felt like much ado about nothing; a complete waste of everyone’s time.
There are so many little scenes here and there throughout the film that seem as if they may be important or will pay off in some way, but they don’t We see Bill and Alice flirt and be flirted with at the party; they talk about temptations they didn’t act on, we see Bill go home with a prostitute, but he doesn’t sleep with her. None of this matters, yet it eats up a lot of screen time. Even the major set piece that everyone knows, even if they haven’t seen the movie, is the orgy that Bill basically sneaks into it, but he doesn’t do anything there. He just walks around and watches some people have sex, before being forced to leave. The only thing that comes out of this is that the woman who helped him get out of the party safely ends up getting killed for her good deed. Why?? Everyone was wearing a mask so Bill couldn’t have identified anyone, plus he wouldn’t have in order to keep his presence there a secret, so what was the point of this innocent woman getting killed?? Bill is consumed with jealousy over Alice’s dream of having sex with other men while he watches, so he decides to go back to the prostitute, but still doesn’t do anything because she conveniently isn’t home, so once he is back with Alice, he apologizes for his recent behavior and the movie ends with her telling him that they need to fuck. What is this movie??
Categorizing this film as an erotic thriller was a mistake. There is sexual tension throughout, but other than the people at the orgy and Alice’s dreams, we never see anyone actually have sex and the sex at the orgy is pretty bland. Free porn online is sexier than this film. If the sexual tension came from a genuine place, instead of merely existing, this would be okay, but since it doesn’t, it isn’t. Eyes Wide Shut is the film version of blue balls; a lot of build up with zero payoff. I can accept that it is a view into a marriage of two people who aren’t really communicating, even though we see them talking to each other. They are are existing in each other’s space, not as full members of each other’s life and only when Bill tries to spice up his own life does he realize he has what he needs at home, he just needs to work at it a bit more. This is a good theme that merely needed to be explored more, which is the overall problem with this movie. Nothing is explored, everything is surface, so in the end, what is the point of it all? Critics tended to love the movie, the masses did not, so I am not alone in my low opinion and even a few critics didn’t fall for the hype and actually judged the film on its own merits, rather than as a Kubrick film or the last film of a respected director. 1 out of 5 stars for the few shots that are well-framed.
