Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick’s final film is upon us. Finally. And I have finally gotten to see it. Yes, it’s taken longer than expected (I had no car for a week and a half!!!), but I finally got there.

And I think it was worth the wait. Even with Tom Cruise.

Story? Well, it’s there somewhere. Tom is Bill Harford, a New York doctor who becomes suddenly jealous when his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman, of course) tells him about a dream fling that she had with a sailor a year before. She didn’t actually have the fling, but she said that she would have if they guy had asked. This starts Bill on a weird psycho-sexual Odyssey all around the streets of New York. This, in turn, leads him to a world of hookers, druggies, pimp fathers (not daddies, fathers), and sexual cults. There’s not much more that I can say without giving something away that may make some of you (are there enough to say “some”?) mad.

The movie is, of course, very interesting. Bill is on his Homeric journey throughout the entire film and, even though he is a participant in the strange goings-on, he is somehow secluded from them, too. He goes to a hooker’s apartment and doesn’t quite get to do the deed. He goes to get a costume for the mysterious masquarade that his friend, Nick Nightengale (Todd Field from Twister and the new Haunting), accidentally brings him to. At the costume shop he runs into Milich (Rade Serbedzija from The Saint and Polish Wedding) and his daughter (Leelee Sobieski from Deep Impact and A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries. Even though Leelee is running around in her underwear (how young is she?) whispering sweet nothings into Bill’s ear, nothing happens to him. He seems to just glide through every incident with some kind of all-powerful, protective shield. Kind of like Odysseus.

Maybe it has something to do with that doctor’s certificate that he keeps flashing like a badge. (What is he? A doctor p.i.? I need to get me one of those things. It gets him everywhere.)

The movie is two and a half hours long, and I think I know why.

Every….word….out….of….Nicole’s….mouth….has….a…………pause………..between….it. I kept waiting for Bill Shatner to appear out of a corner and take over for her. It got kind of annoying in some places, but it worked in other places. At the end, when Victor (Sydney Pollack) is telling Bill what happened, it builds suspense. When Nicole does it at the beginning, though, it only makes her sound high. Which she is in one scene. It did, however, help with the dream-like effect of the movie. I kind of felt like I was asleep for two and a half hours and I just woke up from a really weird sexual dream. Or was it a nightmare?

Another thing that bugged me: the MPAA’s March of “Decency.” There are scenes of orgies in this movie. Everyone knows that. In America, though, most of these scenes are covered by digital people so that we don’t accidentally see any naughty bits. They even use the same girl in two different shots! That’s the attention to detail that gives Hollywood censors the wonderful name that they have today. And that name is Wally Wick.

And then there’s Tom. Oh, Tom. Why did you have to profane this film with your presence. I guess I should explain something, here: I can’t stand Tom Cruise. I think he is one of the most over-rated “actors” of all time. He’s ok, but is he worth his $20 million price tag? Hell, no! He tends to ruin perfectly good movies (see Born On The Fourth Of July with one of the whiniest performances in history) and turns all of his characters into shades of mediocrity. This movie is no exception. In fact, there were times near the beginning that he was so bad that I thought I was going to have to leave. He got better as the movie went on (he lost that goofy grin of his), but then he had to cry. AAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHH!!!!! Don’t let this guy emote! And, as talented as I think Nicole can be (see To Die For) she started off pretty bad in this one, too. All of her pregnant pauses, as I said before, made her sound high. She was supposed to be drunk, but come on! Does anyone talk like that when they’re drunk? That was probably Kubrick’s idea, though, so I can’t really blame her for that.

One little continuity thing: the girl that Bill helps in Victor’s bathroom (how big was that bathroom, anyway? And who has a desk in that close to their toilet?!) is a redhead. The girl at the orgy is a blonde. The girl on the slab is a brunette. All the same girl? Uuuhhh… (A friend thinks that maybe they couldn’t get the same girl to play her at the orgy. You know, if Stanley Kubrick asks you to come back, you say “Screw Spielberg. I’m going back to Stanley!” Especially since this is that girl’s only film role. It was the same girl, they just colored her hair for each scene. Don’t ask why. Only Kubrick knows…and he’s not talkin’.)

There was, of course, no way that you couldn’t tell that this was a Kubrick film. All the way from the semi-grainy film to the use of close-ups, long tracking shots and very long passagways. It’s not as sterile as most of his movies (even The Shining was pretty sterile if you think about it), but the mood was definitely there. The sense of forboding. The dark side of human nature. The envelope pushing. Everything was there to make this a classic Kubrick film. What’s really interesting about this movie is that, even though it takes place mainly in the streets of New York, the whole thing was filmed in England. Even the outdoor locations. Kubrick reconstructed New York in a studio, even sending a guy to the actual locations in NYC to measure how far from the street a newspaper machine was. Now that’s attention to detail! (So what happened with Spartacus?)

Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh missed out on a great film. Too bad we couldn’t get Tom replaced, then it would have been a perfect movie…well, almost.

It took me a while to really get into the movie and the style (as with most of Kubrick’s films), but once I got there I was there for good. I even forgot that it was Nicole that was yelling at Tom. (It was hard to forget that it was Tom since he wasn’t really into it. He always says that he was, but I couldn’t tell.) A great film from one of the greatest directors who ever lived. It’s too bad we won’t get to see his other project that had been hounding him for years: AI. It sounded very interesting. Something about a child robot who was built to grow and think just like a human child. Gone.

Overall, not Kubrick’s best, but definitely worthy of his reputation.

For more about Kubrick and his films on my page, check out my Stanley Kubrick Tribute Page.