Eyes Wide Shut

1999 film directed by Stanley Kubrick (who completed editing the film just before his death) and starring real-life husband and wife (at the time) Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. The film was based on the novel Traumnovelle by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. The screenplay was adapted by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. Kubrick had long been interested in doing a film version of Schniztler's story; at one point he apparently considered adapting it as a comedy, with Steve Martin in the lead role.

The theme music of the film is "Waltz 2" from Shostakovich's Jazz Suite 2.

After a famously long shooting schedule (during which co-stars Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh dropped out, to be replaced by Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson, respectively), the film was released in July of 1999. Critical reaction was mixed, some hailing the film as another Kubrick masterpiece but others regarding it as pretentious, tedious, and meaningless.

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

The storyline follows the surreal, possibly imagined, sexual adventures and misadventures of Bill (Cruise), in shock after his wife, Alice, (Kidman) reveals that she has considered an affair, and culminates in his admittance to a bizarre orgy held in a mysterious castle. The orgy sequence contains some of the most explicit portrayals of consensual sex in mainstream cinema.

Themes

Kubrick's films often deal with the subconscious and the impulses of the Id. When the savage impulses of "the Shadow" (from the psychological theories of Carl Jung), are not integrated with the conscious life, madness results. Kubrick said that he was interested profoundly in the Shadow (the archetype of the savage) and how it emerges despite civilization. In "Eyes Wide Shut," Alice (Nicole Kidman) expresses her fantasy affair to Bill (Tom Cruise) after the couple had been to a party where Bill had treated a prostitute for an overdose. Bill's old friend Nick (Todd Field) tells him about a sexual underworld where men of absolute power have an absolute access to women, and Bill decides to explore this world. He moves into the circle of the Shadow, and he sees the ruthless, remorseless, and violent nature of power as sex and sex as power. He views the naked masculinity of the subconscious, through a mask. He returns to his wife, confessing all (although he was never adulterous). At the end of the movie, she seems to forgive him and says that the two must immediately go home and have sex. In a sense, the couple has integrated their psyches. They have both seen and experienced their shadows and decided to go on.

Critical Response

Critics objected chiefly to two features of the film. First, the movie's pacing is slow. While this may have been intended to convey the nature of dreaming, critics objected that it simply made actions and decisions laborious. Second, reviewers commented on the fact that Kubrick had shot his New York City scenes in a studio and that New York didn't "look like New York." The MPAA, on the other hand, had a separate objection. The film was scheduled to receive an NC-17 rating for its full male nudity, and Warner Brothers digitally altered the film by inserting the silhouette of a "man in black" in an orgy scene. This digital figleaf moved and stood in such a way as to block the objectionable body part. This alteration of Kubrick's vision antagonized many cinephiles, as they argued that Kubrick had never been shy about ratings: A Clockwork Orange had an X-rating.

In contrast to their usual behaviour, the British Board of Film Classification allowed Eyes Wide Shut to be released to British cinemas without the need for the digital alterations seen in US cinemas. The film was rated 18, viewable only by those aged 18 and over.

Lee Siegel, writing in Harper's, felt that most critics responded to the marketing campaign staged by the studio and were .