In 1999 the world lost one of the greatest filmmakers who had ever lived. His name was Stanley Kubrick. His dream was to change to face of filmmaking and to change the way we all look at movies. And for all intents and purposes he succeeded. This was the man who brought us Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and finally Eyes Wide Shut. I have a love/hate relationship with Kubrick. I find his films fascinating and his techniques bizarre and often times brilliant, but his sense of narrative is maddening and many of his films (even those equated as masterpieces) stumble through their long winded third acts. Kubrick was never content to tell a story the way most filmmakers did. At times in his films he abandoned conventional narrative altogether to deliver a surreal and otherworldly experience, case in point - 2001. Many of his films are simply a series of events or set pieces that Kubrick forces the viewer to make sense of. Sometimes these events seem to have little to do with what has come before in the "story" and the only thing tying them together are the protagonist. He uses symbolism, long takes, drawn out dialogue, pauses, classical music, and most notably - silence - to make his points. In a Kubrick film almost nothing is as it seems. He doesn't know how to be straightforward, which is both his greatest strength and weakness. Eyes Wide Shut is a brilliant display of all of Kubrick's gifts as a filmmaker and also his shortcomings. It is a fitting final piece of the puzzle in his filmography and perhaps even answers many questions about the filmmaker himself. Eyes Wide Shut is Kubrick at his utmost peak as a filmmaker. Nothing he could have ever done would have topped it. For me it is the greatest film he has ever made. Many people would scoff at that. I wouldn't blame them either because Eyes Wide Shut is a hard film to like or really even care about, but it is fascinating and it paints an interesting picture of the human psyche when it comes to sex, love and relationships. What makes Eyes Wide Shut so spectacular is it's humanity. Kubrick has been accused of being a cold and calculated filmmaker with little or no interest in real human emotion. He has been called a man of ideas instead of feeling. I would argue that he has always been in search of how to best convey humanity through his ideas as a filmmaker. And here his ideas are fully realized into a picture of disturbing power because of how human it really is. Eyes Wide Shut represents the sexual passion and urges inside of all of us. It represents the ultimate human perversity. It is a scathing statement on how we as people operate on a sexual level. It's the kind of film that only Kubrick could have made.
From the marketing to the finished product, Kubrick had people fascinated by Eyes Wide Shut. It is his only film to open at Number 1 in the box office. Part of this had to do with the fact that people wanted to see what the fuss was about. The film had been shooting for years and spent an entire year in editing. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (who were husband and wife at the time) signed a contract that was open ended and stated that they could not leave the project until Kubrick decided to release them, however long that may be. The trailer for the film was devilishly provocative and yet told you absolutely nothing about the films plot, but everything about what the film was about. Kubrick had two of the hottest and sexiest stars at his disposal and many thought that Eyes Wide Shut would be a sexually perverse and steamy story about married psychiatrists who sleep with their patients. This, of course, proved to be false (to be fair that would have been interesting subject matter in Kubricks hands as well). The speculation was wild and it didn't help that reports were coming out of a supposed orgy scene that had to be digitally altered due to it's graphic nature. Then people actually saw the movie. There were many who passed it off and said it was a film about nothing and that it went nowhere. And there were those who still flocked to the theater because it was Kubrick's last film and the man had died a few short months earlier. There were those who loved the film and thought that it represented the best of Kubrick. And even those that despised it wasted a lot of precious ink do denounce the film for either its boringness or obscene content.
The last thing Eyes Wide Shut is, is boring. From it's opening scene to it's final moments Kubrick drags you along and makes you wonder just what the hell is going on. He structures the film as a thriller with supposed murder and intrigue along the way. But in reality he uses this as a device to explore the human psyche. He is much more interested in the films sexual undercurrents. But his thriller style does prove to have a point - sexual desire and obsession can be dangerous and deadly. It represents a thematic destruction of human relationships. Our bodies are governed by biological needs and Eyes Wide Shut spends most of it's screen time exploring this idea. What is so interesting though, is that there is very little sex in the film. There is plenty of implied sex, but the only real sex scene is the orgy itself, which is shown at a distance. We the audience are the observers in this strange world that Kubrick has painted just as Tom Cruise's character is. We are seeing through his eyes. The fact that there is so little sex is what makes the picture truly disturbing. It doesn't need it. Cruise gets so close to sex over and over again that each time it becomes more dangerous and sinister. There is nothing sexy about Eyes Wide Shut. If anything the film is a denouncement of America's (and perhaps the worlds) fascination with sex. In the world we have today sex itself has become a dangerous weapon that cannot be wielded lightly. Eyes Wide Shut is an exploration of what happens to those who do.
Enough cannot be said about the acting, direction, and cinematography. It is all painstakingly perfect. Kubrick's perfectionism is right there on the screen for all of us to see. Kidman and Cruise chemistry ignites the screen. They are a believable couple and Kubrick was smart by casting people who were actually married in real life. If the film had anything to do with their marriage deteriorating I do not know, but I can certainly imagine it didn't help. Eyes Wide Shut explores subjects that most of us don't want to deal with in relationships especially infidelity and desire. It is a series of vignettes strung together with a loose plot line and underlying meaning. With Eyes Wide Shut Kubrick took his own formula for filmmaking and perfected it. At the end of the movie I finally understood what Kubrick was trying to do all those years and why he made so few movies. His films consumed him and because of that Eyes Wide Shut was a fitting end to his legacy. It represents everything Kubrick has ever wanted to say about us and the way we live (in my opinion, I will not pretend to know this great man's inner most thoughts and feelings). He did change the way movies were made and how we see them. There will never be another Stanley Kubrick and there will never be another Eyes Wide Shut.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Dir. Stanley Kubrick
159 min.
Zero Academy Award Nominations... what a shame.
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