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Legs wide open >> Eyes Wide Shut is mysterious, ambiguous and fascinating
by MATTHEW HAYS
For many, the reverse question is: why would Kubrick cast them? Though Kidman did a fine turn in To Die For, and Cruise has worked with directors like Martin Scorsese and Barry Levinson, the two have a bubble gum veneer that's mighty sticky. When one thinks of Cruise in particular, Jerry Maguire springs to mind, not HAL. But the casting has paid off, in spades. Kubrick is fully aware of the offscreen baggage carried by the famous Hollywood couple and exploits it beautifully. In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's 13th and final feature, Mr. and Mrs. Cruise play an extremely wealthy Manhattan couple (he's a doc, she's an art gallery manager between gigs) with one young daughter. The picture of success, early in the film the two arrive at a swank party held by a close friend (Sydney Pollack). Being the sexy things that they are, when separated briefly they are promptly swooped down upon by members of the opposite sex (Kidman by an older Hungarian, Cruise by two nubile young babes) who aggressively proposition them. Neither bite.
The Kidman confession The following day appears utterly routine, until the evening sets in and Kidman confronts Cruise--during a toke--about what she suspects was a dalliance he committed at the party. Pot-induced paranoia makes Kidman feisty, and she's soon pissed off about Cruise's generalizations about gender. Affronted by his lack of jealousy and by his confidence that she would never fool around, Kidman embarks on a confessional soliloquy (and the very finest moments of her acting career). Indeed, she did fool around, and knew full well she was risking everything by doing so. Sitting in stunned silence, before Cruise can respond he's beckoned away on a house call. Here's where the film reviewing gets really difficult. To give away many more of the details would amount to a series of crimes and misdemeanours (I'll try to be illuminating and discreet). Simply put, Kidman's confession sets off a brutal reaction in Cruise, one of paranoia, obsession, remorse and vengeance. Fidelity seemingly isn't so important after all. The realism upon which the film has been anchored up until that moment is let go, and Cruise (from whose point of view the film is told) embarks on a nightmare triggered by the revelation of unfaithfulness.
Spooky eroticism Kubrick, who wrote the screenplay with Frederic Raphael (inspired by a 1926 novel by Arthur Schnitzler), touches on a bizarre range of themes and motifs here, most obviously infidelity. (Eyes Wide Shut will resonate wildly with American audiences, still sweating out a post-Monica Lewinsky hangover.) The film also touches on prostitution, HIV, nymphomania, orgies, sex with minors--and there's even a hint of necrophilia thrown in for good measure (no, Cruise doesn't actually kiss a corpse). In an irony the late Kubrick would have relished, there are also stinging scenes involving mortality. Kubrick's final film is a spooky, erotic epic that transcends genre. He employs Cruise as an empty canvas, mapping out sexual anxieties across the actor. In a marketing directive clearly designated by Kubrick before his death, the press kit for the film includes bios and a cast and crew list, but utterly no notes explaining the film to the media (ideally, all press kits would appear just like this one). Kubrick clearly wanted to leave Eyes Wide Shut as an open text, an ambiguous work, a conceptual question with most of its riddles left unanswered. What with all of the comparisons between watching movies and dreaming, it is fairly clear Kubrick intended Eyes Wide Shut to be a kind of dream-like meditation on the craft itself. It's a fitting finale. Though it may not go down in the film history books as being as landmark as 2001, nor as crowdpleasing as The Shining, it does bear Kubrick's name. And it lives up to the billing. It's a brilliant piece of work.
Eyes Wide Shut opens Friday, July 16 |
There's a reason why Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman kissed off a series of lucrative offers, spent close to two years of their lives working on one movie and put up with an obsessive director who routinely asks for a scene to be shot in 100 takes: they wanted the name Kubrick to appear on their respective CVs.