EYES WIDE SHUT

Eyes Wide Shut, the last movie directed by Stanley Kubrick, is an unsexy non-thriller that the advertisers tried to sell as a sexy thriller, with commercials showing Tom Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman getting intimate to Chris Isaak's "Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing." Well, it got bums into seats the first week...

Back around 1960, while living in New York City, Kubrick and his wife seem to have had some marital tensions.  Then Kubrick read this German novella by Arthur Schnitzler from Vienna in 1920 or so involving marital tensions, and we get  this movie, with Cruise as a doctor (please don't laugh) and Kidman as his wife having marital tensions in an apartment with Mrs. Kubrick's art on the wall, in a 1999 New York artificially recreated in London studios. (Did I mention the marital tensions?)

Time for a quiz.  Let's say your wife smokes dope and loosens up, then starts talking about this guy she saw when you were both on vacation and suggests, sounding totally serious, that she was sorely tempted to run off with him.  What approach do you take?

1.  The sophisticated approach.  Laugh it off.  She had her chance to dump you, mon ami, but here she is still, no?

2.  The mature approach.  Take it for the cry for help it probably is, tell her that you don't want to ever lose her, and show her that you'll do whatever it takes to make your marriage work.

3.  The childish approach.  Get hurt feelings, walk out on her and have weird adventures in the artificial NYC.

We all know what approach the plot requires, don't we?  If there's one thing I hate more than plots that require characters to be careless at crucial moments, it's plots that require characters to be immature.  Like Spike Lee's Summer of Sam, whose whole plot requires John Leguizamo to be a hopeless douchebag, or Julia Roberts' romantic comedies.

Baby made a bad, bad film.  You'd better be a hardcore cineaste if you hope to sit through this movie, which is something less than three hours long and feels even longer. My skepticism was first aroused when I saw that the script was by Frederic Raphael, an Oscar-winning screenwriter whose work I find glib, pretentious and empty. And I knew it was going to stink when I saw that opening scene with Kidman sitting on a toilet! (Six Feet Under did that too.)  I hope she got paid well.  The nations of the world should sign an international treaty banning scenes that show people sitting on toilets.

The movie doesn't work on the level of realism:  nothing seems to make sense, from the clean NYC streets to the glamorous hooker to the woman who kills herself to save him (or something like that) to the fatuous orgy scene.  It's the sort of movie where a piano player who's performed at the orgies talks admiringly of the skanks he's seen there, but when we see him playing at this orgy he's wearing a blindfold!  Just like in Full Metal Jacket when he cast Vincent D'Onofrio as a would-be Marine who was clearly too obese to meet USMC recruiting standards.  For Kubrick, visual obviousness often trumps credibility.

Nor does it work on the level of fantasy.  Kubrick's direction is literal and heavy-handed when the movie needs briskness and flair.  The last hour is especially annoying, with Cruise flailing around to that relentless piano chord! The scene near the end where it looks like Sidney Pollack will explain everything leaves us still perplexed, but maybe it was intended that way. (Artistic ambiguity, see?)

LeeLee Sobieski has a particularly tasteless role, as a costumer's teenage daughter (or ward or something) whom we first see getting it on with a couple of men, leaving Daddy enraged and threatening to call the cops. But they presumably give him enough money to win him over, because the next time we see her he's making her wear skank makeup and pimping her out! Har har. (That's Frederic Raphael's idea of something clever.)

Raphael says that when he questioned Kubrick's decision to update the novella to the present day, Kubrick responded that love is the same as it's always been. That may be so, and it may even be true that sex is much the same, notwithstanding contraception and AIDS.  But marriage, in the eight decades after the age of Freud and Schnitzler, is something that most definitely did change!

Is there any way this movie could have worked?  Maybe if they'd cast an actor with greater depth than Cruise, like Ralph Fiennes.  Keep Kidman--she's the best thing in the movie--but instead of contemporary New York, try London in the 1960s. (Shades of Michelangelo Antonioni.) And get rid of that last hour!  Or maybe it would have been a stinker anyway.