Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick | USA/UK | 1999 | 145 mins

New Yorkers Bill (Tom Cruise) and Alice (Nicole Kidman) Harford are a happily married couple with everything. At a Christmas party, Bill meets an old college friend, pianist Nick Nightingale, then vanishes for a while when the host, Victor Ziegler, seeks his help in treating a woman who has OD'd in his bathroom. Sworn to secrecy, Bill cannot tell his wife what happened when, suspicious, she confesses her own fantasy of infidelity. Then Bill, a doctor, is called out. Heading home, a series of chance encounters lead him to Nick. The pianist gets a call to attend a secret masked ball. Intrigued, Bill decides to follow along...

The death of Stanley Kubrick before the release of Eyes Wide Shut made what would already have been one of the movie events of last year - the director's first film for 12 years, and one with a long and troubled production history - into a film that it was impossible to evaluate objectively. Instantly we become that much more aware of its mortality theme and started to treat it as Kubrick's own summation of his 40-year filmmaking career.

Unfortunately, Eyes Wide Shut really isn't all that good a film. Sloppily plotted and coincidence-ridden, its also overlong and could, much like every Kubrick film from 2001 on in fact, have done with losing a good half hour. Whereas Full Metal Jacket's use of London locations to represent Vietnam was inspired, Eyes Wide Shut's simply doesn't convince. Instead it just reminds you that this supposedly obsessive director preferred to compromise a film rather than fly out on location. The film also reveals that Kubrick was something of a dirty old man. A naked Nicole Kidman is one of the first things we see, but those who wanted to see Cruise's bits will be disappointed.

All in all, then, Eyes Wide Shut was hardly worth a 12 year wait and provides an unsatisfactory epitaph to a once-great director whose abilities seem to have declined in inverse proportion to his critical acclaim.

Review by David Khune Jr
Taken from EUFS programme spring 2000