Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

• Review: **** (out of ****)
• Starring: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Todd Field, Sky Dumont, Marie Richardson, Rade Sherbedgia, Leelee Sobieski, Thomas Gibson, Vinessa Shaw
• Director: Stanley Kubrick
• Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Frederic Raphael (Novel: Arthur Schnitzler)
• Length: 159 min.
• MPAA Rating: R (For strong sexual content, nudity, language and some drug-related material)

Infidelity, sexual discovery and love turn Stanley Kubrick's final film into one of his greatest as Eyes Wide Shut captures the soft and hard edge of relationships.

Kubrick's death in 1999 sadly ended the career of one of history's most significant contributors to the art of cinema. Eyes Wide Shut tells Kubrick's final story of the toll fidelity can take on a relationship when a woman admits to her husband that she's contemplated an affair.

Former Hollywood mega-couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star as the doctor, William Harford, and his wife Alice.The film begins with the couple attending a high-voltage Christmas party at the house of one of Dr. Harford's patients, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). Dr. Harford decides to chat up his old medical school chum Nick Nightingale (Todd Field) while Alice veers away and strikes up a conversation with a love-crazed Hungarian (Sky Dumont).

When William disappears to assist Ziegler with a drugged-out prostitute in his bathroom, Alice assumes he's gone off with the two beautiful models he's had conversations with not long before. Both resist any temptation and return home where a subsequent evening sees the two having a meeting of the minds over a joint. When Alice reveals that she had thought of having an affair while the couple were on vacation, Dr. Harford is coincidentally called away to the deathbed of another patient.

William escapes the conversation but can't rid his mind of the image of his wife having sex with another man. What happens afterwards is a sexual odyssey where Dr. Harford slinks around the New York City nightlife hoping to experience a one-night stand in revenge for the images going through his head.

Eyes Wide Shut is probably Kubrick's most frank piece. It takes a very simple subject, faithfulness, and mixes in his classic visual symbolism and dehumanization to make a point for fidelity. The couple live their lives through dreams and fantasies that, if realized, would drive a wedge between them. As Dr. Harford returns to the night of potential debauchery, we see him find reason upon reason supporting his decisions not to engage in an extra-marital affair.

Kubrick has never flinched when presenting his warped reality. Here, an elaborate orgy for the rich marks Kubrick's most intriguing symbolic effort ever. As each guest is required to be masked for the event, anonymity protects its participants from exposure and from the traditional trappings of love required before sex.

In Eyes Wide Shut the characters must rationalize their desires and fears while maintaining a level of maturity and dignity. Their attempts fail. What Kubrick's other films have done is sensationalize real-life events and situations so that they feel surreal. In doing so, he paints a vivid analogy to reality and forces the audience to question their lives and actions and understand if they have lived up to their own expectations.

-Wesley Lovell (July 24, 2004)