Eyes Wide Shut [Blu-ray]

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

The first thing to bear in mind are that this film was hyped way beyond necessity. As if the general public had any interest in the "Kubrick" listed below "Cruise" and "Kidman". To them this was just another Big Actor's next Big Movie. Passing it off like a "real Hollywood couple gets busy on the big screen" heightened expectations for something Kubrick wasn't trying to achieve. It suffered the same audience reaction as The Phantom Menace, and made only a fraction of the money.

Critics seemed to be lining up to take potshots at this film. Why? Recent history shows us that all of Kubrick's films from 2001 onward have been attacked critically, and subsequently hailed as classic years later. The same is true of most of Orson Welles' work. Few critics took the time to see this movie more than once before spewing their venom. A filmmaker like Kubrick is not going for direct emotional contact with the audience. He is aiming far deeper, asking the viewer to reflect on not only the images, but the themes, and the emotional investments of the characters. The subtlety is not something common in today's films, and something critics apparently can't process quick enough to meet a press deadline.

For all those complain that the film isn't sexy or erotic enough are missing the point completely. It's not about sex. It's about many other things, some of which linger in the background, some that aren't noticeable on the initial viewing. Kubrick raises questions about our institution of marriage, the nature of faith, commitment, temptation. That most in the audience weren't willing to meet Kubrick, Cruise, and Kidman halfway in this meditation isn't a comment on the quality on the filmmaking, it's a shortcoming of the sensory-deadened society. If Kubrick had been more in touch with today's film culture, would he have bothered to give us this complex of an experience? Let's thank him for his seclusion.

A NOTE on the DVD not being letterboxed: Kubrick (again, like Welles) preferred the aspect ratio of television, and left extra space in his frame for their widescreen theatrical showings (some are letterboxed on Home Video as well). The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut are meant to be seen in the full-screen standard format, and therefore aren't available in letterbox, so don't feel you're being cheated out of any compositional content. Unfortunately you are being cheated by Warner Bros' refusal to remove the digital figures blocking the orgy scenes, inserted for theatrical release to secure the "R" rating. Only in America...

The main themes in Eyes Wide Shut are not those of sex and marriage - now, certainly, the story that is told by the actors alone echoes of these subjects. However, what the actors are doing onscreen more often than not was meant by Kubrick to take second place to the imagery used in the film. And the themes portrayed by the imagery are most certainly not that which mainstream reviews have let on.

So what exactly is Eyes Wide Shut about, then? Not sex. That much should be obvious from the re-appearance of the film's title after the short shot of Nicole Kidman's buttocks (telling us that we're not really seeing what we're seeing). Eyes Wide Shut is about the wealth and power of society - about the upper class. It's about how the elite men in this world manipulate their inferiors and treat them like mere possessions. It is about the mistreatment of women and the lower class, and the source of that mistreatment.

From a single viewing of Eyes Wide Shut one may assume that Nicole Kidman's character has some "power" in her relationship with her husband, that she has some other meaning to him and his acquaintances than an object - a possession. One will see, however, after analyzing the film carefully, that she has no power. Kidman's character claims she is looking for a job in one scene, but we never see her looking. Instead, we see men - powerful men, who manipulate and control their inferiors to suit their needs - looking at her. Look carefully and one will see a series of parallels between Kidman's character and that of the call-girl we see at Ziegler's Christmas party - both have red hair, are approximately the same height, and seem to have a fondness for mind-altering drugs. The character played by Kidman is nothing more than another, married prostitute.

One of the most disturbing images the film shows us is that of Nicole Kidman's character "training" her daughter to follow in her footsteps - the footsteps of the wife as a possession, the wife as an object... the wife as an "upper class call-girl". When we see her daughter working on math problems, she is trying to figure out which boy has more money than the other one. The one sentence we hear as she is reading a storybook to her mom is something to the effect of "and so I jumped into bed". The countless scenes of Kidman's character and her daughter grooming themselves side-by-side should make this point obvious enough. As well, in the film's final scene, we see the daughter flitting around the shopping store, picking up items that all relate her back to the women that Bill Harford has abused in his nighttime excursions - she picks up a Barbie doll (similar to Milich's daughter, who he is pimping off to any man who wants her), a teddy bear (just like the one we see when Bill Harford is with one of the prostitutes), and a purple baby carriage (like the one we see twice outside the prostitutes' door). And for one last disturbing flourish, Kubrick has her walk past a toy conspicuously called "The Magic Circle". History repeats itself and has come full circle, and Bill and Alice are too busy to notice.

Recall the cafe that Bill Harford walks into when he discovers that Mandy - the girl he believes saved his life at the orgy - has died. Notice the music that's playing in the background. It's no ordinary classical music. It's Mozart's Requiem. The piece is a song mourning the death of someone. One may think it touching of Kubrick to include this little thing in the film, but it doesn't stop there - look closely at the paintings covering the walls in the room. They are antique paintings of women - women who, in their times, were treated like possessions just as each and every woman we see in this film is treated. It is a requiem for them - it's a requiem for all those who have been downtrodden on by the socially elite.

The film's final scene has been interpreted by many as a happy ending. I do not see it that way. Bill and Alice are in a position to DO SOMETHING about all of the atrocities that have been committed by the upper class. Someone has been killed and they have this one opportunity to expose it. But no. They're both too caught up in their own problems to notice, or even understand, the bigger picture. In Kubrick's last word on this subject, or, for that matter, any subject, Alice and Bill, along with the rest of the world are "**cked". Given the chance to change the world in which they live for the better, they give it up - nay, they fail to even acknowledge that the opportunity exists. For all of their meaningless chatter about being wide awake now, they're still screwed over. Their eyes are still wide shut.