EYES WIDE SHUT
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva FINAL CURTAIN Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut' Not every great artist brings his career to a splendid dose. How could they, when few know they're on the way out? (Even the...
...an unconsummated encounter with a prostitute...
...Even the eighty-year-old Verdi considered capping the enchantment of Fafeta^fwith a stormy Lear...
...Stanley Kubrick's swan song turns out to be a squawk...
...a courtesan...
...So let's not mince words about Eyes Wide Shut...
...For once, the blame can't be loaded onto the original story or even the screenplay derived from it...
...Traumnov-elle (Dream Story) may not show Arthur Schnitzler in peak form, but it is a compelling psychological study of a husband discombobulated by irrational jealousy...
...But that touch turned into a death grip...
...Think of the lacerating Humbert Humbert-Lolita quarrels in his Nabokov adaptation or the smarmy mutual manipulations of Alex the droog and the government minister at the conclusion of A Clockwork Orange...
...Bill Harford, but does that excuse all the clunky repetitions...
...In Kubrick's films, conversations rarely begin in medias res...
...In the cold light of day, he tries to retrace his steps only to discover that his savior may have met a nasty end...
...declaring herself "ready to redeem him" (with her life...
...and, climactically, his in-filtration of a club of upper-class orgiasts from whose clutches he escapes only through the intercession of a masked beauty (an aristocrat...
...The same method prevails here, but Kubrick seems to have lost his sense of proportion...
...There is a solid and exciting story here, but Kubrick's idiosyncrasies, once the trappings of an original sensibility, have hypertrophied to the point where they damage his storytelling...
...Still, that sound came out of a creature unmistakably a swan...
...Rather, he prefers to show the entire arc of encounter: the meeting, the slow engagement or opposition of interests, the complication of tensions, an emotional explosion (or avoidance of it), a simmering down, a definite period...
...Bill: "Come inside with you...
...Prostitute: "Come inside with me...
...with her sexual abasement...
...When Bill, trying to locate a missing friend, interviews a waitress, why does this strictly informational scene take two minutes to play out when a twenty-second chat would have done the trick...
...The anxiety this might evoke is universal...
...When the pathetic Marion's declaration of love to the doctor is cut off by her fiance's arrival, why do we have to watch the newcomer enter the foyer of the townhouse and walk all the way down a long hall to the sickroom...
...Unlike some other aging titans (I'm thinking of George Stevens and John Ford) whose last efforts were indistinguishable from the work of hacks, Kubrick never completely lost his touch...
...Nevertheless, Raphael has laid out the action in just the way Kubrick always favored, in lengthy, slowly building scenes, and his substitutions of New York's locales and conventions for Vienna's mostly made sense to me...
...Is this conversation or a Berlitz lesson...
...Prostitute: "What do I recommend...
...Back in his wife's arms and privy to more of her fantasies, the doctor learns to appreciate what is dependable in marriage and to accept what is not...
...The dialogue in Frederick Raphael's screenplay, which transposes the action from turn-of-the-century Vienna to contemporary New York, may be trying to echo the psychological waverings of Dr...
...And, once inside, Bill: "What do you recommend...
...This young doctor realizes that his wife hasn't been unfaithful to him and almost certainly won't be, but her mere daydream of infidelity, with its disclosure of unanticipated erotic depths, proves enough to spur him into the darkness of nocturnal Vienna...
...If all Commonweal 11 September 10,1999...
...a Kafkaesque visit to a costumer literally moonlighting as a pimp...
...SCREEN Richard Alleva FINAL CURTAIN Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut' Not every great artist brings his career to a splendid dose...
...Wouldn't a sense of frustration be better conveyed by the camera staying in the room and a knock on the door interrupting Marion's plea...
...Reviewers have complained that no modern husband would be shocked by his wife's sex fantasies, but Raphael makes it clear that Harford is devastated that his wife was ready to dump her marriage and abandon her child to realize a fantasy...
...Although these events are ostensibly real, the hero's consciousness is so exacerbated by jealousy and danger that everything is experienced as delirium...
...His adventures there include a declaration of love from a dead patient's daughter right beside the deathbed...
...In the face-off between Bill and a millionaire who holds the key to the mystery, why is there so much conversational bric-a-brac about shooting pool and appreciating good scotch (delivered amidst some maddeningly fidgety staging) before we get to the matter at hand...
Vol. 126 • September 1999 • No. 15
