Eyes
Wide Shut (1999)
"This movie was thrilling, scary, and
beautifully filmed. Kidman was excellent and it was one of the
first times I actually enjoyed Tom Cruise in a movie. However, it
was the supporting roles that had the best acting in the film. The
three-minute scene between Bill and the adorable Alan Cumming as
the gay desk clerk was one of the best moments of the film. Go see
this film!" -- Anonymous Review
It was inevitable that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes
Wide Shut would be the most misunderstood film of 1999.
Kubrick died four months prior to its release, and there was no
end to speculation how much he would have tinkered with the
picture, changed it, "fixed" it. We'll never know. But
even without the haunting enigma of the director's death--and its
eerie echo/anticipation in the scene when Dr. Bill Harford
(Tom Cruise) visits the deathbed of one of his patients--Eyes
Wide Shut would have perplexed and polarized viewers and
reviewers. After all, virtually every movie of Kubrick's post-U.S.
career had; only 1964's Dr. Strangelove opened to
something approaching consensus. Quite apart from the author's
tinkering, Kubrick's movies themselves always seemed to
change--partly because they changed us, changed the world
and the ways we experienced and understood it. And we may expect Eyes
Wide Shut to do the same. Unlike Kubrick himself, it has time.
So consider, as we settle in to live with this
long, advisedly slow, mesmerizing film, how challenging and
ambiguous its narrative strategy is. The source is an Arthur
Schnitzler novella titled Traumnovelle (or "Dream
Story"), and it's a moot question how much of Eyes Wide
Shut itself is dream, from the blue shadows frosting the
Harfords' bedroom to the backstage replica of New York's Greenwich
Village that Kubrick built in England. Its major movement is an
imaginative night-journey (even the daylight parts of it) taken by
a man reeling from his wife's teasing confession of fantasized
infidelity, and toward the end there is a token gesture of the
couple waking to reality and, perhaps, a new, chastened maturity.
Yet on some level--visually, psychologically, logically--every
scene shimmers with unreality. Is everything in the movie a dream?
And if so, who is dreaming it at any given moment, and why?
Don't settle for easy answers. Kubrick's
ultimate odyssey beckons. And now the dream is yours. --Richard T.
Jameson
Alan Cumming Filmography
