On Screen
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen KUBRICK'S FINAL ODYSSEY By Raphael Shargel Twice during Eyes Wide Shut, the obsessively brilliant movie Stanley Kubrick completed just before his death, Alice Harford (Nicole...
...Some will find the film ridiculous, hermetic, puritanical, and misogynistic...
...she is aroused by her own body far more than by Bill's...
...Like every film Kubrick made over the last 30 years, Eyes Wide Shut rarely allows acting or dialogue to unveil the psychology of its characters...
...and the cruel, coldhearted authority figures ?? Paths of Glory, Spartacus and other films...
...Eyes Wide Shut takes place over three days in late December, but the characters wear autumn fashions...
...They are boundaries for an increasingly intense journey into a sick world of rampant sexuality and a correspondingly frustrating climb away from it...
...After passionately defending his integrity in response to Alice's monologue, he persistently lies to her and abuses his standing as a successful doctor to secure information and open doors...
...Its main target is the foundation of Alice and Bill's union...
...Dressing for Ziegler's party, Alice asks Bill how she looks and he turns toward a mirror, complimenting her appearance while gazing admiringly at his own...
...When Bill arrives home he hears Alice's second confession...
...Alice never explains the impetus for these cruel and lustful visions, but we need only get a good look at the Harfords' pristine apartment and the tedious routine of their lives to understand what her emotions are rebelling against...
...The first and last scenes, where the couple dress for the Ziegler affair and take their daughter Christmas shopping, are the most quotidian, but only in the context of the rest of the film...
...The character motivations and narrative pacing of Eyes Wide Shut, as that title suggests, follow the logic of a spellbinding dream...
...Later, when they embrace in front of another mirror, Alice can't take her eyes from her reflection...
...Darker still were her consequent dreams...
...his renewed and more vigorous efforts to cheat on his wife are thwarted by another series of outlandish circumstances...
...Yet the only way she can imagine renewing their bonds is through sex, as if intercourse could redeem infidelity...
...The film emphasizes the joylessness of such surface attentions and narcissistic lives...
...Nick (Todd Field), an old friend who is a piano player, declares that he has been hired to perform at an extraordinary party and reluctantly provides Bill with sufficient information to infiltrate the most elaborately ritualized orgy ever depicted in a feature film...
...Her concluding proposition, phrased with sufficient bluntness to draw a laugh from the audience, also reveals the profound shallowness of this couple...
...Still, it shouldn't disappoint the director's fans, who are already familiar with the splintered narrative of 2001 and Full Metal Jacket...
...Determined to match his wife's moral desertion with a physical infidelity of his own, Bill is stopped at every turn by confusion, guilt or the intervention of another...
...The director has also revived the art of the dissolve...
...The centerpiece of the film is a masked, cloaked orgy, an absurd sequence in which Bill suffers the worst of his many indignities...
...The movie concerns a marriage that is as hollow as it is resilient, and though the director relies heavily on the considerable charm and outstanding good looks of his leads, their deliberate acting and generally superficial conversations tell us little...
...It is a film of energy and vitality, the work of a director in his prime, someone prepared to go on from here, to show us more...
...It's a shame that he can't...
...The Harford and Ziegler homes are beautifully but lifelessly decorated: It seems there is no delight in either house...
...To Kubrick's credit, he eschewed the telltale, gauzy, slow motion that is a commonplace cinematic signal for unreality...
...His environment reflects the impotence of his desire, the revenge of a guilty conscience...
...Later Ziegler, whom Bill recognizes at the orgy, tries to convince him that this sacrifice was staged in order to frighten him into keeping the organization secret...
...Many of his carefully paced scenes end by fading into one another or sinking slowly into black...
...It takes place in an enormous mansion where perfectly formed women dance slowly in unison around some sort of high priest, strip off their garments to the moaning tones of a synthesizer, and are sent forth into the crowd of onlookers to have intercourse with the men...
...Indeed, its weird, seductive interchanges commence before the couple's revelatory confrontation, at a party thrown by Bill's friend Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack...
...the restrained acting and cold, emotionally torturous marriage in Barry Lyndon...
...She imagined herself liberated from her husband by the officer, copulating with myriad lovers as she laughs mockingly at a helpless Bill...
...Bill's wallet contains a seemingly endless supply of money in large denominations, yet he never visits a bank or needs to ask for change...
...She desired him so intensely that she felt suddenly willing to trade her entire future for a single night in his arms...
...A gorgeous prostitute named Domino (Vinessa Shaw), who reads books on introductory sociology, picks him up on the street, brings him to her apartment, and claims that when she's working she doesn't keep track of the time...
...The streets remain damp, but it never rains...
...It is a Christmas movie whose characters approach the season with stunning listlessness...
...Bill's excursions are thus a commentary upon and a reaction to the already dreamlike existence he leads with Alice in their fantastic digs on Central Park West...
...It is certainly excessive, loaded with gratuitous shots of naked women...
...the priggishly disturbing sexuality in Lolita and A Clockwork Orange...
...Harvey Keitel was originally cast as Ziegler, but it is a wonderfully ironic joke to have the director of Three Days of the Condor covering up a possible conspiracy...
...In Traumnovelle, the Arthur Schnitzler novel that Eyes Wide Shut is based on, the author indicates a moment after the wife's confession when the jealous husband may begin to dream...
...When Bill returns to Alice after the second day of his journey, he symbolically signals his frustration by switching the lights off the family Christmas tree...
...But it is a shallowness that Cruise, Kidman, and most other good looking contemporary stars have endorsed in movie after movie, and with none of Kubrick's irony...
...Strangelove...
...It is the most avant-garde work of Kubrick's career, impossible to call lighthearted unless you compare it to his other, much more oppressive works...
...Kidman and Cruise— who met nine years ago on the set of Days of Thunder and are married in real life— are perfect tools for the director's assault on the cinema's obsession with bodily perfection...
...When he visits the home of apatient who has just died, the man's daughter, whom he barely knows, pantingly embraces him, claiming that she's in love...
...Eyes Wide Shut is his most wildly satiric work since Dr...
...Because Eyes Wide Shut is both satiric and sober, farcical and despairing, it is bound to irritate anyone looking for a steady narrative that articulates its meaning...
...The exteriors look nothing like New York City, where it is allegedly set...
...His camera movements are as fluid as ever, carrying us into and through locations where every light source appears several times brighter than it ought to be and actors stand out against starkly monochromatic backdrops...
...But while the orgy sequence takes the form of a studied pagan rite, the story is not without elements of sacrifice and salvation fitting to the season...
...Bill is led to believe that he escapes unscathed because one of the prostitutes offers to be punished in his place, to die for his sin...
...Alice never tries to realize her desires...
...There has perhaps been a conspiracy by the orgiastic revelers to punish those who led Bill to and from their ritual in safety...
...Bill functions in a surreal environment, although neither he nor anyone else questions its oddities...
...The new people he meets have more ordinary names...
...During the Odyssey of wandering that follows Alice's first revelation, almost every person he meets attempts seduction...
...On Screen KUBRICK'S FINAL ODYSSEY By Raphael Shargel Twice during Eyes Wide Shut, the obsessively brilliant movie Stanley Kubrick completed just before his death, Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) relates her sexual fantasies to her husband Bill (Tom Cruise...
...Here, without abandoning any of his trademark meticulousness, he appears content to produce a remarkably original work that functions according to the rules it sets for itself...
...The next day, more confused than ever, he cancels his appointments and returns to each of the places he visited the night before, finding them changed in the light of day...
...But audiences will misunderstand Kubrick's intentions if they take its gravity at face value...
...Yet whenever the couple are separated Bill undergoes experiences that are as bizarre and capricious as Alice's desires—and, to him, equally humiliating...
...The unpredictable progress of the plot, the ornate production design, and the astonishingly vivid camerawork are far more revealing...
...The first time, nine years into their marriage, he learns that she has in fact thought of being unfaithful: Infuriated by his suggesting she is incapable of lascivious yearning, she describes a moment the previous summer in a hotel lobby when a handsome Navy officer caught her eye...
...But with the exception of a few unnecessary blackand-white inserts when Bill furiously imagines Alice making love to her sailor, the film's unorthodox style is maintained from beginning to end...
...Throughout, we see her at home playing with her seven-year-old daughter, decorating the Christmas tree, smoking, and eating cookies as she waits for her husband to come home from work...
...Almost everyone we meet is strikingly beautiful...
...But what is refreshing about Eyes Wide Shut is that, for the first time in his career, Kubrick did not appear bent on making an ultimate statement about a particular genre...
...Each experiment with erotic excitement sends him confusedly down a divergent path, and as he tries to sin again he descends into further, darker digressions...
...In the past, he seemed driven to create the supreme film noir, the perfect war movie, the most profound science fiction epic, the most scandalous sex farce, the most ornate costume drama, the most frightening horrorpicture...
...Eyes Wide Shut extends the superficial, utterly physical romance in Thunder and so many other contemporary films beyond the initial coupling and into a marriage...
...As for redemption, at the end of the film Alice proposes that she and Bill awake from their dreams of disloyalty, if not forever, at least for the time being...
Vol. 82 • August 1999 • No. 9
