Film review

Stanley Kubrick (1999)

The title of Stanley Kubrick’s last film is ingenious and succinct.  It isn’t the only ingenious feature of Eyes Wide Shut but it’s just about the only succinct one – until the last, one-word line of the script.   The closing exchange between Bill and Alice Harford (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman) takes place in the children’s toys section of a department store, where the Harford are Christmas shopping with their little girl Helena (Madison Eginton).  It goes like this:

Alice     But I do love you and, you know, there is something very important that we need to do as soon as possible.

Bill       What’s that?

Alice     Fuck.

The human compulsion to fuck could be said to be the central subject of the film, though it’s more often described in terms such as those used by Todd McCarthy in Variety – ‘a deeply inquisitive consideration of the extent of trust and mutual knowledge possible between a man and a woman’.

That said, Eyes Wide Shut, now re-released on its twentieth anniversary, received a mixed critical reception in 1999.  It’s acquired a mythic status in the course of the intervening years, which isn’t surprising.  Not only was it a legendary director’s swansong; he died, suddenly, only six days after showing a cut to Warner Bros executives.  These things somehow become more important as retrospect lengthens.  According to Jan Harlan, his brother-in-law and executive producer, Kubrick considered the film his ‘greatest contribution to the art of cinema’.  Never mind that it was still in post-production when he died.  His standing and notorious perfectionism confer on that judgment the quality of an ex cathedra pronouncement.

Eyes Wide Shut is an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story (Traumnovelle), published in 1926 and set in the Vienna of Sigmund Freud.  The screenplay, by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, moves the action to modern-day New York, where Bill Harford works as a GP.  He lives with Alice, his wife of nine years, and their seven-year-old daughter in a palatial apartment on Central Park.  The action extends over no more than two or three days, in the run-up to Christmas.  The evidence of festive celebration is ubiquitous but Kubrick doesn’t overstress it, thereby throwing into sharp relief how far Bill travels from the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year.

At a Christmas party hosted by Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), one of his wealthy patients, Bill and Alice both resist attempts by other guests to seduce them.  Bill also recognises, and talks with, the party pianist – Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), a medical school contemporary who dropped out before graduation.  The following evening, smoking marijuana together at home, Bill and Alice discuss desire and temptation.  He tells her he never worries she might be unfaithful because ‘Women don’t … they basically just don’t think like that. … Men have to stick it every place they can … but for women, it is just about security and commitment’.  In response, Alice reveals that, during the couple’s holiday in Cape Cod the previous summer, she met a naval officer.  She was so strongly attracted to the man that she fantasised about him and even considered leaving Bill.

The conversation is aborted when Bill receives an urgent call to go to the home of a patient who has just died.  The effect of what Alice has told her husband is harder for him to move on from.   He keeps imagining her having sex with the naval officer (Gary Goba).  The long night that follows for Bill is a succession of sexually charged episodes – a kind of (unconsummated) revenge on Alice’s readiness for adultery.  The dead patient’s daughter (Marie Richardson) tries to seduce Bill, even as she’s waiting for her fiancé (Thomas Gibson) to arrive.  A prostitute called Domino (Vinessa Shaw) approaches Bill on the street and he goes back to her place; a phone call from Alice asking how soon he’ll be home interrupts his preparations for sex with Domino and he leaves.   Bill makes his way to the jazz club where Nick Nightingale told him he’d be playing.  Over a drink, Nick tells Bill he’s going straight on to another engagement – an assignment he’s had before, at a mansion, where he plays the piano blindfold.  Last time, though, the blindfold ‘wasn’t on so well … oh, man.  Bill, I have seen one or two things in my life but never, never anything like this… and never such women’.

Bill is eager to find out for himself:  in order to do so, he needs to know a password and wear a costume, including a mask.  Nick supplies the former (‘Fidelio’, with its ironic connotation of fidelity).   To get hold of the latter, and although it’s late at night, Bill goes to a costume rental store.  In the course of his visit there, the shop owner, Milich (Rade Šerbedžija), is enraged to discover his teenage daughter (LeeLee Sobieski) with two Japanese men (Togo Igawa and Eiji Kusuhara), all of them in a state of undress. This is nothing compared with what Bill witnesses when he gets to the mansion Nick told him about (and where Nick is indeed playing the piano blind).  The costume ball taking place is a sexual ritual, starring nubile women naked except for their mask and (in most cases) a G-string.  One of these women warns Bill he’s in great danger.  When he’s unmasked by the scarlet-cloaked master of ceremonies (Leon Vitali), the same woman asks for Bill to be spared, promising to ‘redeem’ him.   He’s allowed to leave the mansion, on condition that he doesn’t reveal what he’s witnessed there.  He exits without knowing the fate of his redeemer, though it’s implied she’ll pay a price for her intervention.

Returning home to find Alice laughing in her sleep, Bill wakes her.  She becomes upset and recounts the dream she was having, of sex with the naval officer and other men – she laughed to think of Bill witnessing this.  The next morning, Bill goes in search of Nick at his hotel but too late:  the reception clerk (Alan Cumming) explains that Nick, his face bruised and his manner scared, checked out in the early hours, accompanied by two formidable-looking men.  Bill then returns the costume to the rental store, though the mask turns out to be missing.  Milich, in contradiction of his behaviour the previous night, is now his daughter’s pimp.

Bill reads a newspaper story about a beauty queen’s death from a drug overdose.  A visit to a hospital morgue confirms that she is Mandy (Julienne Davis), who was a guest at Ziegler’s Christmas party.  After having sex there with her host, Mandy had to be revived by Bill when she overdosed on a cocktail of drugs.  Bill is then summoned to the home of Ziegler, who knows Bill was at the mansion the previous night because he too was present.  Ziegler also reveals that the masked woman who saved Bill was Mandy.   When Bill gets back home this time, he finds Alice sleeping and the rented mask on his pillow next to her.  He tearfully confesses to his wife what he’s been up to during the last twenty-four hours.  The next morning, they take Helena on the conclusive, in the event conciliatory, Christmas shopping trip.

My Penguin copy of Dream Story is less than a hundred pages long.  Plenty of readers would get through it in much less time than it takes to watch Eyes Wide Shut (159 minutes).  Its length isn’t necessarily a defect but the film’s unvarying tempo is limiting and increasingly problematic.  The prevailing solemnity isn’t taken seriously by everyone:  some regard the piece as a satirical comedy about the fragility of male ego.  If so, it’s a remarkably sluggish and portentous one, and hard to see how these qualities function satirically – even if their effect is sometimes comical.  The masked ball is the culmination of Bill’s after-dark journey but it’s an odd sort of culmination.  The film’s centrepiece, this is also its most risibly protracted episode.  It features an orgy neither shocking nor even energetic but, rather, decoratively mechanical.   Although the Venetian masks are wonderfully various and sometimes startling, the words that emerge from under them are reliably daft.

Up to this point, the authority of Kubrick’s technique has made for suspension, if not of disbelief, then at least of laughter.  Even allowing that Bill’s a GP, the Harfords’ home is improbably opulent.  (Alice doesn’t appear to have a paid job; there’s no suggestion either has inherited wealth.)  Yet the camera’s movement round the apartment – the movement of a magisterial prowler – is intriguing and unnerving.  Once we’ve been to the ball, however, the narrative never regains its poise:  the ball may be a masked one but you feel that Kubrick, as well as Bill, gives himself away there.  The rhythmical oddities of Eyes Wide Shut – the lengthy pauses between lines, Tom Cruise’s slow-motion reactions – come to seem no more than mannerisms.  Most ridiculous of all is the epidemic of repetition in the dialogue, especially in the form of questions asked in response to statements.  If someone says, ‘She may not even be coming back’, you can rest assured the person it’s said to will reply ‘She may not even be coming back?’  Sometimes the question is followed by a re-statement, as in ‘It was fake’, ‘Fake?’, ‘Yes, fake’.

The intentional humour is hit-and-miss.  The gracefully ambiguous Shostakovich waltz music that plays during the opening (and closing) credits admits the possibility, among other possibilities, of a mysterious comedy of manners to come.  But when Kubrick goes for intentional creepy-comic effects, as he occasionally does, he executes them so deliberately they’re liable to misfire.  A couple of actors come close to rescuing things – Alan Cumming, theatrically sly, and Rade Šerbedžija, who’d be even funnier if Kubrick had quickened the pace of his scenes.  Unsubtle direction detracts from sequences in other registers too.  Todd Field’s Nick has a good, hectic blend of excitement and alarm as he tells Bill what he saw from under the blindfold.  The sinister lighting of Field’s face signals a more obvious kind of apprehension.

Nick’s blindfold and the masks at the ball are facets of the multivalent title, which is one of the film’s undoubted strong points.  The pianist is unsighted; dislodging his blindfold makes for an eye opener in more ways than one.  Through the eyeholes of their masks, the ball guests see each other’s full physicality without knowing each other’s true identity – a state of affairs naturally suggestive of how people might be thought to conduct themselves, wearing different kinds of mask, in the social world beyond the mansion.  The title can also refer, of course, to eyes closed through lack of observation or in sleep.  It hints that what’s seen in dreams and fantasies may reveal more than what’s seen in waking life.  Another possible interpretation of the title is presumably unintended:  Kubrick seems unaware of the implications of his camera choices.  It’s possible to explain the close inspection of naked women on the grounds that it reflects Bill Harford’s preoccupations but difficult, even so, to disagree with the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver that Eyes Wide Shut shows Kubrick’s ‘queasy predilection for female nudity […] hopelessly exposed; as male-gaze cinema goes, this is exhibit A’.

While there’s no suggestion that Bill’s experiences are figments of his imagination, the bizarre interruption of his usual life (not that we see much of that) amounts to a displacement of reality, and is triggered by his wife’s fantasies – as Schnitzler’s title may also imply.  Even though, the salience of dreams in the culture of newly Freudianised Vienna can hardly be replicated in New York at the other end of the twentieth century, Kubrick and Frederic Raphael follow the novella’s plot quite closely, and retain elements indicating an incursion into the real world of the inexplicable or, at least, the irrational:  Bill’s mislaying of his mask and its eventual reappearance on his side of the marital bed in which his wife is sleeping might be either supernatural or a kind of Freudian slip.  A section of the Harfords’ final conversation includes:

Alice:    Maybe I think we should be grateful … that we’ve managed to survive through all of our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream.

Bill:      Are you sure of that?

Alice:   Am I sure?  Only as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, can ever be the whole truth.  And no dream is ever just a dream.   The important thing is we’re awake now.

According to IndieWire, ‘the purpose of Kubrick’s style in Eyes Wide Shut is to lure the viewer into a dreamlike state’.  If this is right, the director fails to achieve his purpose.  The orderly, almost stately movement of the film neither suggests a dreamscape nor induces a sense of dreaming – for this viewer anyway.  The only thing that did was a few shots of the same shops in the same street that Bill repeatedly finds himself walking down.  Kubrick’s soundtrack is, as usual, impressive but the key contributions to it – Jocelyn Pook’s disorienting original music for the ball, the insistent piano notes from György Ligeti’s Musica ricercata – are confounding in ways that are not oneiric.

When Victor Ziegler accuses Bill Harford of being out of his depth your heart goes out to Tom Cruise, who’s in the same predicament.  Acutely aware of the weighty artistic responsibility entrusted to him, Cruise tries really hard to achieve depth – how hard he’s trying probably explains why Bill registers thoughts and emotions so slowly.  It’s a role like this, not Ethan Hunt, that for Cruise is the true mission impossible.  In what’s effectively a supporting part, Nicole Kidman shows her far superior range and expressiveness although, like her then husband, she’s also clearly aware of what a big deal it is to share star billing in a Stanley Kubrick movie.  Her effects sometimes come across as too carefully calculated.

Sydney Pollack is excellent in his first appearance, when Ziegler welcomes his party guests:  Pollack turns conventional bonhomie into shady shtick.  He is, vocally and temperamentally, such a naturally fast-moving screen performer that he, more than anyone in the cast, seems denatured by the halting dialogue.  In their later exchange, Ziegler tells Bill:  ‘The reason I asked you to come over is … I need to talk to you about something.  … It’s a little bit awkward.  And I have to be completely frank.  … It isn’t a medical problem.  Actually … it concerns you’.   And so on.  For Sydney Pollack, delivering this kind of stuff really must have seemed like a bad dream.

29 November 2019