Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
After Dr. Bill Harford's wife, Alice, admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.
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38 films that influenced Eyes Wide Shut
What critics say influenced Eyes Wide Shut
As he ventures deeper into the night, he is challenged by the darker side of society, not unlike Kyle MacLachlan in “Blue Velvet” or even Griffin Dunne in “After Hours”.
Yet despite some fascinating and/or disturbing scenes that are reminiscent in their bizarreness to what Griffin Dunne experienced in Martin Scorsese's similarly odd, nighttime odyssey, "After Hours," the story as a whole is never as compelling as its individual pieces.
Although the teaser ad campaign, reportedly masterminded by Kubrick himself, gives equal billing to Cruise/Kidman/Kubrick, the film is really about Tom Cruise, playing to some extent a Kubrick surrogate (his apartment is modeled after one Kubrick and wife Christiane shared) who takes an After Hours-style detour into a surreal soundstage version of New York at night.
And now begins his long adventure, which has parallels with Joyce's Ulysses in Nighttown and Scorsese's "After Hours,'' as one sexual situation after another swims into view.
The story is like a hybrid of James Joyces "The Dead" and Scorseses After Hours.
It is like a slower, sadder version of John Carpenter’s theme to Halloween.
As John Carpenter proved in Halloween, complexity is not always necessary to set the proper mood (and, strange as it may seem, elements of this score reminded me of Halloween's).
As he ventures deeper into the night, he is challenged by the darker side of society, not unlike Kyle MacLachlan in “Blue Velvet” or even Griffin Dunne in “After Hours”.
By the time Bill cruises voyeuristically through the mansion’s orgiastic set pieces, we should be feeling the same fascination and horror we did when Dennis Hopper took Kyle McLachlan on the psychosexual highway to hell in “Blue Velvet.”
Unlike, say, Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, William may be tempted, but he never makes it past voyeurism.
Like Crash and Blue Velvet, two similarly fearless, sexually transgressive but ultimately moralistic films that straddled the fine line between genius and lunacy, Eyes Wide Shut is above all a masterpiece of sustained tone, a tightrope act that pays off in rich and unexpected ways.
Here, Kubrick hands her two scenes that are arguably the film's strongest -- a pair of erotic monologues, one recounting a long-standing obsession with a stranger and another describing a dream in hushed, ashamed tones, that recall the similar centerpieces of Bergman's Persona and Godard's Weekend.
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To say that this movie is a version of Billy Wilder's 1955 comedy "The Seven Year Itch"--about the fantasies Tom Ewell enjoys of the sexpot (Marilyn Monroe) who movies in upstairs while his wife is vacationing--would be a ludicrous analogy, to be sure, grossly trivializing Kubrick's themes.
Cruise, an actor I've never warmed to, performs well enough – that goofy, toothy smile of his threatens to rip through his cheeks perhaps too often, but then there's a bit of Ray Russell's Mr. Sardonicus in that as well, an aspect of the performance that Kubrick doubtless intended, like a puppy dog eager to please despite the rolled-up newspaper.
At the funeral of Ernst Lubitsch, the great director of "To Be or Not to Be" and "The Shop Around the Corner," Billy Wilder is said to have exclaimed, "No more Lubitsch!"
At the funeral of Ernst Lubitsch, the great director of "To Be or Not to Be" and "The Shop Around the Corner," Billy Wilder is said to have exclaimed, "No more Lubitsch!"
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The story is like a hybrid of James Joyces "The Dead" and Scorseses After Hours.
Reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries," the film is lyrical and passionate, but never sexually titillating as was so widely predicted, and there is a strange, rewarding fascination in watching one character go through his own journey, whether it be in physical or emotional terms.