Review of Eyes Wide Shut (1999) by Tiberio S — 06 Nov 2012

Like all Kubrick films, there's a simplicity within the complexity, beginning with the oxymoronic title: Eyes Wide Shut is about common New Yorker themes -- a culture of elitists living in a "city that never sleeps," working themselves to death to ascend the ranks of acceptance, closing their eyes to hidden truths, symbolized by an underground secret society, and a lack of clarity as to what IS and what's IMAGINED.

Dr. Bill Hartford (Tom Cruise) is sleeping while he's awake on a midnight odyssey that speaks something of Kubrick's own inner-workings. Kubrick himself was a sleepless New Yorker, welcomed into the elite (probably after he left for England though) where I imagine he saw realities uncomfortable, but undeniably intriguing to you and I. In the spirit of Scorsese's After Hours, Hartford, like Paul Hackett, is on a trek where he will see things he doesn't understand, and often doesn't know how to 'properly' approach. For Kubrick, it's a vision he's earned, and it's a fitting exit for a director who made this last effort his most deeply personal reveal.

Bill and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) return from a Christmas party, where they were both separately tempted to act unfaithfully with a member of the opposite sex. They both decline, but at home engage in sex-talk over some marijuana, at which point Alice reveals she once fantasized about cheating on Bill with a sailor she saw at another party some time ago. Bill silently grows anxious, his pride at question. They're soon interrupted by a doctors call -- Bill has to visit a family he serves whose patriarch just died. And the odyssey begins.

The film heavily relies on ones own sexuality to be interpreted. For myself and my best friend, we both suffer from deep sexual paranoia, a condition we've been getting through lately, but one which made the emotional overhead clear. My ex-girlfriend is very much a sexually open and even promiscuous person; in her home there wouldn't be hesitation to talk openly about sex. Thus when I told her about this film and how I felt about it, she said she saw it with her parents when she was 10 years-old and didn't have any particular reaction to the orgy scenes or anything she saw. I was stunned by how apathetic she was. My first time viewing the orgy scenes I was 12, and I didn't follow much of the movie because I was honestly just looking for late-night porn! I was less than turned-on by those scenes, and always found my dick remained in my pants as I would just watch the images. Each night the film played on HBO and I'd go back to watch the images but never to bust-a-nut. This fascination, and refusal to treat it as masturbation, probably revealed quite a bit of who I was and what sexuality really was for me, and is to this day something I'm still working on to understand. I'm not sure where Kubrick generates this paranoid feeling from, though I've heard he's a paranoid person. But his parents seemed quite willing to empower him, and it worked. So it leaves me knowing there's more to explore, and I'm fascinated by that. To continue this little bio, I was 12 when I first saw portions of the movie, and revisited the film about 4 more times. I declared myself a Kubrick diehard by around 18 after really becoming more than familiar with his films from about 15 onward (I didn't know who Kubrick was when I first saw Eyes Wide Shut). And upon being a diehard, I wouldn't touch that film until last year. There were years of intense sexual paranoia, mostly stemming from my aforementioned ex, that had me petrified of revisiting that movie -- but when I did, the experience was entirely new, and not easily explainable, but drove the anxiety for sure.

So why put a personal bio in a film review?

Because that's Kubrick. Kubrick films sit with you; they last; they change over time; their ideas become clearer; their mysteries unravel upon sparking new mysteries, which keep the films lasting. It is why the man has only 13 complete feature films over a career spanning 40 years, and why this one deserves revisit after revisit. To this day, it's still the film that I'm most scared to revisit. I've only seen it 3x as a more conscious filmgoer, excluding those pubescent years when I wanted wanker material but couldn't use this!

AND.

Because a review for a cinematic experience like this should be about the viewer; it's important to know WHO YOU ARE seeing it. I offer THIS EXPLANATION:

You might still be the person sitting there scratching your head saying "I DON'T GET IT." Alright, you probably got as far as suggesting it's SOMEBODY'S DREAM.

Bill has ventured into the night anxiously, dreading ramifications of Alice's revelation. But don't think there's not a lot on Alice's mind just because she's in for the night and infrequently on screen. She may have been the deliverer of tense nerves, but that can only mean she now fears retaliation.

SO as much as this MAY be Bill's dream, it's may ALSO be Alice's dream. We see Alice sleeping a lot, implying the dream-weaving. You could argue it's Kubrick's dream; a memoir or just a way of presenting dreams akin to Italian cinema. BUT in a film like this, it's not about theorizing what we can't know -- sound familiar? You can beat a dream to death with theories, but you can never really explain everything you see in it. There's points you take away from dreams, overheads, possibly decisions made as a result. But the details won't even remain in your memory, you'll fill them in with something else. So if you can't let go of the compulsion to know whose dream it is, the answer is it's YOUR dream. Steven Spielberg said that Kubrick wanted to completely change the form of movies, and I think that's what he was going for here. There's a strong level of control he gives to the viewer to interpret, fill-in blanks, and write their own story. He just needed to present the right stream of consciousness to give audiences that control, and I do believe he was close to succeeding.