Eyes Wide Shut - 1999
I once thought this film was a sickly depraved nightmare. Now, I believe it to be much closer to a bona fide masterpiece. This doesn't mean it's not disturbing. It is. Or extremely challenging. It's that too. But what it is, above all, is a rich text for analysis.
Of course, that's only when you hit the second and third layers of this piece of art. The first level is just about entertainment and all things Stanley Kubrick. Things like the way the film is loosely structured around three HUGELY important conversations by Kidman and Cruise, the lovers themselves being a real life married couple who were always in the public eye. So what does Kubrick do? He pulls them out of all their other projects and keeps them for a 400 day film shoot! He gives each of the actors notes independently of one another, clears the set for certain scenes with one lead and then vice versa, and finds a ways to push and prod and pull at the strands of their marriage. I'll let you judge for yourself to what degree these things made it to the screen.
But that's not all old Stanley did. He chose a largely piano-driven score which is simply haunting. A third grader could probably bang it out on a keyboard, but it has the effect of completely disarming the viewer. So too does the aesthetic of the cinematography. All of the lighting is hazy and dream-like. Add to this that much of the film is comprised of muted, almost disembodied dialogue and long tracking shots down hallways of rich mansions, and you have a positively phantasmagoric product on your hands.
Then there's the conspiracies bubbling up around this picture. The "deeper layers" that no one talks about. But it's all there. Sex trafficking. Powerful elites victimizing young women. Ritualistic practices and symbols of the freemasons (the location where he obtains his cloak is an allusion to rainbows), and more disturbingly, the presence of 15 year Leelee Sobeiski as a sexual pawn, raising pedophilic implications.
And yet, for Kubrick, this is all simply background. Many of his films in one way or another have been loaded with little clues and symbols for the discerning viewer to parse and analyze. Moreover, he seems to have made it a goal to put a new societal institution under the harsh gaze of an examiner in each film. War, the military, humanity's relationship to technology have all had their day in court. Now it is marriage's turn.
When Eyes Wide Shut was wrapping production, several publications (of which Entertainment Weekly was one) were rather bombastic in their hype. "The sexiest film ever made," one article read. This is probably why the film partially flopped at the time. This film deals with sex constantly, but it is rarely sex-y. The famed scene at the Rothschild Mansion is far more ritualistic than orgiastic. (In fact, it’s quite tame by many of today’s standards). The tone, lighting, and especially score fill the audience with a growing dread. Instead of eroticism we have disquiet. Cruise is not getting away with some fling here. He's walking through a living nightmare.
So, I conclude that MANY movies purport to ask authentic questions of relationships, but here Kubrick actually does it. Here he gives us a meta-tinged view into one celebrity couple's marriage tugging at the seams of security and trust in the face of desire. The nakedness in this film is as much about the themes discussed, the souls bared, the secretive urges unearthed as any masked femmes shedding their robes. But you get all of it in Eyes Wide Shut. The relationship. The powerbrokers' abuses and the secret societies which have become all too real to us 20 years later. An absolute fire performance from the majestic Sydney Pollack. What you're left with is a movie on the deep questions of love and intimacy from the guy who directed The Shining. Yikes! It is as creepy and vertiginous as you imagined, a puzzle box which I return to time and again.
FOF Rating - 4.5 out of 5
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