eyes wide shut: DVD review

review by rob gonsalves

director/producer
Stanley Kubrick

screenwriters
Stanley Kubrick
Frederic Raphael
based on the novel Traumnovelle by
Arthur Schnitzler

cinematographer
Larry Smith

music
Jocelyn Pook

editor
Nigel Galt

cast

Tom Cruise (Dr. Bill Harford)
Nicole Kidman (Alice Harford)
Sydney Pollack (Victor Ziegler)
Todd Field (Nick Nightingale)
Alan Cummings (Hotel Desk Clerk)
Vinessa Shaw (Domino)
Marie Richardson (Marion)
Thomas Gibson (Carl)
Rade Sherbedgia (Milich)
Leelee Sobieski (Milich's daughter)
Julienne Davis (Mandy)
Abigail Good (Mystery Woman)

mpaa rating: R
running time: 159m
u.s. release: July 16, 1999
video availability: VHS - DVD
official website

other stanley kubrick films
reviewed on this website:

- full metal jacket

see also:

- kubrick: the films, 1955-1999

Everyone should talk like the characters in Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, now available on DVD. Life would be that much more soothing and slow-paced, and couldn't we all use that? Instead of the rapid, hectic rhythm we all must suffer, we'd have the luxury of exquisitely solicitous conversations with sprawling pauses:

Now, in the theater, where Eyes Wide Shut swiftly died, I can understand why a lot of people lost patience with exchanges like that. You're there in those uncomfortable seats, you probably have some idiot behind you commenting on how lousy the movie is, you have to go to the bathroom. On DVD, none of that matters; you can watch it in perfect comfort. And, despite the flap (by me, among others) about the lack of a letterboxed version on DVD, the movie has never looked crisper. What looked sort of intriguingly grainy in the theater has apparently been cleaned up for its digital debut. Perhaps this movie was always meant to be viewed at home on your television, the more intimate mode.

Reviewing it after just one viewing last July, I noted that Eyes Wide Shut "will take time, and multiple viewings, to yield up its full meaning and resonance." Good call, if I do say so myself -- and if people are willing to watch The Matrix over and over and read deep things into it, there's no reason that a master's final work deserves any less attention. Some details that opened my eyes wider the second time:

· Eyes wide shut. When Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) are preparing for the party, she asks him how her hair looks. He says "Great" without looking at her (which she calls him on). This married couple hardly ever look at each other except in moments of confrontation or trouble. In the famous kissing-in-front-of-the-mirror scene, they're not looking at each other, but at their own reflections.

· Eyes wide open. Bill makes more eye contact with every other woman he meets than he ever does with Alice -- most notably Mandy, the prostitute he revives early on by repeating "Look at me." He will encounter her twice more: at the orgy, where only her eyes set her apart from the other nude masked women; and in the morgue, where her eyes are closed forever.

· Red as a danger signal. The door leading into the apartment of Domino, the movie's other doomed prostitute, is red. So is the billiard table in the home of Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) near the end, when Ziegler delivers his highly extraneous explanation for everything (more on this later). When Bill is being followed, the blank-faced man pauses near a red STOP sign -- it's as if the man were a figure from Bill's subconscious, warning him to turn away from his obsessive suspicions and return to the safety of marriage. (Note the headline on the paper Bill buys: LUCKY TO BE ALIVE.)

· Watchmen. Almost everywhere Bill goes, there is a stoic man (or men) standing outside -- sometimes to allow Bill entrance, sometimes just as security. When Bill's little daughter asks if she'll get a puppy for Christmas, she adds the odd detail that "he could be a watchdog." Bill's response to her query? "We'll see." Alice also tells her later, "We'll just have to wait and see." Waiting and seeing are pretty much all Bill does throughout the movie -- and all we do, as well. It's also what watchmen are paid to do.

· Countless other references to seeing or not seeing. The film's first line of dialogue: "Honey, have you seen my wallet?" Nick Nightingale is blindfolded during his gigs at the private parties, but manages to see some things anyway. The enraged costume dealer Milich yells at the Japanese men who were frolicking with his daughter: "Couldn't you see she's a child? Couldn't you see she's deranged?" At the orgy, Bill says he's "had a very interesting look around." All of this helps to explain the title, which Kubrick's cowriter Frederic Raphael reportedly considered dumb; Kubrick could just as easily have titled it Fear and Desire (the name of his first feature).

· It's a wonderful life: Everywhere Bill goes, he finds a Christmas tree, and in some scenes the Christmas lights are way over the top (as in the early party sequence). Like George Bailey, Bill wanders the streets and enters into a kind of alternate reality. This being Kubrick, though, he ends the movie not on cheerful holiday music and his hero's beaming face, but on a single word of obscenity spoken by the woman who set all this in motion. (Has no one noticed how funny EWS is? This is a psychological epic triggered by the ravings of someone who's stoned off her ass.) It begins with "Honey" and ends with "fuck" -- the odyssey from vague affection to a new, harsher directness of language and spirit.

· That marvelous say-nothing dialogue. Kubrick was far less interested in words than in action as an engine for a narrative. A fascinating essay by Ira Nyman in the July/August 1999 issue of Creative Screenwriting considered the frequent use of phatic dialogue -- "phrases which have no information content" -- in the work of Kubrick. Except for Alice's monologues about her fantasy and dream, and Ziegler's speech near the end, the dialogue in Eyes Wide Shut is almost entirely repetitive and impersonal. But then this is Kubrick territory, where people hardly ever communicate; Kubrick was interested in dialogue as an expression of how very little of importance is ever said.

· That long-ass Ziegler scene. Now, in the theater, I think this was the straw that broke the camel's back for many viewers. We're at the 2:20 point, we should be heading for the home stretch, and along comes Ziegler to tell us a lot of shit that doesn't especially affect anything. In fact, what he says raises more questions than it answers. Having seen it again, I'm prepared to defend the scene: For one thing, it mocks the viewer's need for resolution, by over-explicating in a way that doesn't satisfy us (much as the shrink did at the end of Psycho). You keep waiting for a revelation that ties things together, but all Ziegler says is that Mandy's death had nothing to do with what went on at the orgy. Of course, he could also be full of shit. Bill spends about half an hour of screen time wandering around chasing a non-mystery, or at least a mystery that isn't cleared up to our satisfaction. Kubrick obviously intended it this way.

· Finally, a small stupid detail: you know you're in Kubrickville because a Warner Bros. cartoon is playing on the kitchen TV, just like in The Shining. There are tons of parallels between the two films, too. The masked couple glimpsed in The Shining (when Wendy Torrance is seeing visions near the end) are right out of the orgy scene. EWS is an anti-erotic erotic film, the way The Shining was almost an anti-horror film: Both are more like contemplative essays on their respective genres -- let's take it apart and violate the rules and see if it still works. (A lot of people didn't like or understand The Shining at first, either -- Steven Spielberg, for one.) All work and no play makes Bill a dull boy? Both films also have no narration (most Kubrick films do) -- appropriate since they are both about men who are blocked and frustrated in various ways. They have no inner voice speaking for them. So they wander vast halls and encounter demonic reflections of their psyche.

I suppose I should get around to the DVD specifics. Yes, this is the R-rated version as seen in American theaters, complete with the digital figures blocking the copulating couples. But as I said in my review, this actually makes the film dirtier, since you just visualize the hardcore details that Kubrick didn't include in the first place. It's also perfectly in keeping with the film's anti-erotic aura (Bill's visions of Alice having sex with the naval officer are actually much steamier -- I wonder why the MPAA had no trouble with those). Bill is continually blocked in his attempts to get laid, so it makes a sort of perverse sense that we're blocked from seeing everything in the orgy sequence -- and it doesn't seem as if we're missing much anyway.

The DVD includes the theatrical trailer, itself a masterpiece of suggestion and concision, along with two TV spots (one using Chris Isaak's "Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing" from the trailer, the other using the ominous Gyorgy Ligeti piano music heard ad infinitum in the film's final hour). There are also interviews with the aforementioned Spielberg, Tom Cruise, and Nicole Kidman; the stars both get choked up when asked how they felt about Kubrick's death. (Kind of a stupid question really.) Kidman's interview is longer and much more revealing about what went into her unfairly panned performance (considering that Alice spends most of her screen time either drunk or stoned).

But it's not as if they're the only two people in the film; I would've liked to hear from some of the excellent supporting players, like Marie Richardson, Alan Cummings, Rade Sherbedgia (his work as the strange costume merchant Milich is great comic relief), Todd Field, and the amusingly named Sky Dumont, who plays the Hungarian who hits on Alice. Has anyone else noticed that the Hungarian, with his bushy brows, slicked-back gray hair, and wolfish grin, looks like an elongated Martin Scorsese? The resemblance really stood out to me the second time around, as so much else did. I've talked enough about what I discovered; I'll leave the rest for you, to see for yourself.