It comes as no surprise that "Eyes Wide Shut," the late Stanley Kubrick's final masterpiece, deals with sexual temptation. After all, anyone who saw one of the film's trailers in Warner Bros.'s advertising campaign received the impression that "Eyes Wide Shut" promised to be Kubrick's jump into the world of pornography filmmaking. Despite Warner Bros.'s use of sex as the only means to sell this movie to audiences, the film certainly rises above common pornography flicks by giving sharp viewers a lot to think about.
"Eyes Wide Shut" stars Tom Cruise as the suave Dr. Bill Harford and Nicole Kidman (Cruise's real-life wife) as Bill's sexy wife Alice. In the beginning of the film, Nicole relates a story to her husband about a time in her life when she came close to cheating on him with a sailor. Startled by this, Cruise embarks on a long (the film is two hours and 39 minutes), surreal journey into sexual temptation reminiscent of Adam and Eve, testing his fidelity and his grasp on reality.
Like Martin Brest's "Meet Joe Black," the acting style and delivery of dialog in "Eyes Wide Shut" occurs very, slowly; however, unlike Brest's partial failure, Kubrick's movie does not feel excruciatingly long while watching it. Instead, his use of deliberate, cautious dialog delivery adds a surreal quality to the movie that "Meet Joe Black" lacks completely. The restrained technique serves as foundation on which the rest of the movie is built. The movie's photography, acting and script use this base to elaborate and expand on its themes.
Reminiscent of David Lynch's "Lost Highway," the entire film seems so surreal that it forces viewers to constantly question the characters' reality. Undoubtedly, Kubrick deliberately and meticulously engineered this effect to reinforce the themes of his intentionally vague and complex script. In the film, Bill ventures into a seemingly real but dreamlike world where he can hardly believe anything he sees; although the movie passes off Bill's experiences as truth, they seem like a fantasy. In juxtaposition, Alice relates a sleeping dream and a personal sex fantasy to Bill, but her visualizations seem more realistic than Bill's reality.
Another layer on top of this complexity is Alice's constantly muddled and altered state of mind -- she starts the film drunk, becomes high on marijuana, cries continuously after experiencing a nightmare and goes into shock after a conversation with her husband. Conversely, Bill seems to never have an affected mind, yet his experiences are much more extraordinary than those of Alice.
Also, like "Lost Highway," the film's script, written by Kubrick and based on Arthur Schnitzler's novel, is intentionally confusing. More than once I heard the guy sitting behind me in the theater trying to explain the movie's entire plot to his wife. Some characters overlap into others, many women intentionally look the same and a significant amount of vague dialog refers to more than one event or character. For example, when Bill's wealthy and powerful friend Victor Ziegler (played by Sydney Pollack) discusses a "party" and a "prostitute," he seems to be referring to both parties and both prostitutes in the film.
Kubrick's masterful directing continues in "Eyes Wide Shut," and the film's genius adds a brilliant finale to an already impressive body of work. In addition to Kubrick's traditional long takes and moving camera shots, especially apparent is his effective use of color. For example, viewers will notice that broad red strokes paint the screen whenever Bill encounters the evil of sexual temptation. Each time Bill manages to escape the lures, the screen is flooded in gold when he returns to his apartment. Cauliflower-blue light often fills scenes of discovery and depression. Moviegoers should pay particular attention to the composition of the soft and beautiful Christmas party scene at the movie's beginning and the pivotal, frighteningly crimson orgy-sequence.
As so many other recent films have bragged, "Eyes Wide Shut" originally received an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America due to the aforementioned sequence involving hundreds of beautiful, naked women in an orgy. After Kubrick's death, Warner Bros. added computer generated actors in strategic positions to block out offending actions (but they insist Kubrick knew the change was a possibility). Although there's still an ample amount of full-frontal nudity in the film, nothing crosses "Playboy's" line of good taste, and unlike straight pornography, Kubrick uses the orgy to serve a specific purpose in his meaningful plot. As opposed to its serving as the plot, the sequence makes a hefty statement on the danger of impersonal, isolated sexual contact. Also obvious from this sequence is Kubrick's adept ability to handle horror and scare movie watchers. The more frightening parts of the orgy -- complete with intrusive and alarming piano music -- reminded me of deeply disturbing scenes in "A Clockwork Orange," although they are not as extreme.
In the end, when the numerous naked breasts lose their novelty, when the plot's mysteries are explained (or as explained as Kubrick wants), and when Bill discovers himself, the script returns to an ancient, biblical issue -- marital fidelity. The question of whether Bill and Alice can stay faithful to each other in their stressed marriage lies at the heart of the film. When at the film's end Bill utters, "A dream is not only a dream," Kubrick wants us to revaluate our sexual values. How exactly he wants us to change them we may never know, but his "Eyes Wide Shut" certainly gives us something to make it difficult to go to sleep at night.
