Eyes Wide Shut review – Kubrick’s swansong is a dreamy masterpiece

Few films are as polarising as Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s much debated final feature, which returns to cinemas this week in honour of its 20th anniversary. Unveiled to lukewarm critical reviews back in 1999 and generally considered to be a lesser effort from one of cinema’s greatest visionaries, its release was also tainted by its maker’s unexpected death. Stanley Kubrick never got to find out how the public felt about Eyes Wide Shut; he passed away, age 70, mere days after screening the film for lead stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. But maybe it was a good thing he never got the chance, since it’s taken years for this strange, complicated, and – believe it! – slyly funny study of sexual desire to be given its proper due. What, you have to wonder, has changed?

The film did have its fans, even in ’99. Martin Scorsese declared Eyes Wide Shut to be one of the best films of the ’90s, though most people who saw it wrote it off as pretentious and meaningless. Now it’s obvious that Eyes Wide Shut carries a lot more weight than it was originally given credit for, and rewatching it reaffirms there is a hell of a lot happening on almost every conceivable level. It is, perhaps more than any other Kubrick film, a fascinating work to deconstruct; a film that begs for personal interpretation, for theories and personal considerations. Part of the fun is, of course, in trying to work out what Kubrick was trying to say. But as is the case with all dreams, there are no easy answers. Perhaps what’s taken so long is the acceptance of the film as an unsolvable enigma – and the need for us to gain some distance from the idea of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a couple at the centre of the film.

Cruise stars as Dr. Bill Harford, who lives a comfortable life in a massive New York apartment with his beautiful wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), and their young daughter. This seemingly perfect set-up hits a snag when Alice, tipsy and stoned one night following a lavish party, admits to having sexual thoughts about another man. Bill, shaken by the revelation and intent, perhaps, on experiencing thoughts like this himself, embarks on an ambling nighttime odyssey through the streets of New York. Along the way he will encounter all manner of strange and sexually-charged situations – eventually leading him to an exclusive, password-protected orgy in the suburbs where rich people get their rocks off in a giant mansion.

It’s here that Bill – masked and cloaked – infiltrates a secret sex society in the much parodied centrepiece of Kubrick’s film; mesmerising not because it is particularly explicit, but because of the way Kubrick allows us to glide through the rooms and corridors of the mansion with the same woozy sense that he did with the hallways of the hotel in The Shining. We, like Bill, are silent spectators to this strange and impressively staged sequence, one that – in itself an indictment of the rich ruling class that seems all the more timely in 2019 –  is both inherently erotic and yet completely unsexy at the same time. All the while Jocelyn Pook’s disarming score likens the experience to stepping into the past and into some arcane ritual.

Cruise and Kidman, together here not only on screen but also in real life, are both at the top of their respective games. Their relationship was one that Kubrick was rumoured to have exploited to the benefit of his picture. And this is of course the sort of film in which the production process and the final product seem interchangeable. Cruise, especially, has always been more interesting in films that toy with our perceptions of his screen persona; here he enters Kubrick’s realm and – perhaps unwillingly – becomes a pawn in the director’s game (Kubrick allegedly found ways to drive Cruise’s jealousy over Kidman). The sense of Cruise’s character being out of his depth in the movie surely carries over from his sense of feeling similarly in real life. His performance has an antsy quality, as though trapped in a movie he cannot quite fathom, hoping that eventually he will wake up.

Eyes Wide Shut never asks us to approach its scenario with a logical mind (Kidman’s character is called “Alice,” after all)  – a mistake that was maybe assumed in 1999. Its evasive, dream-like slipperiness is purposeful, as proven by Kubrick’s decision to build fake New York sets that are so very nearly convincing, but not quite; disorienting in the way that dreams are. Dense with subliminal uses of colour, it’s a film that titillates and teases, and Kubrick’s intent to deliver a “waking dream” matches any effort by filmmakers like Lynch or Tarkovsky. In its use of odd dialogue rhythms, measured pacing, and inventive cinematography, Eyes Wide Shut – as it constantly eludes your grasp and never reveals its true meaning – might even stand as cinema’s best attempt to capture the strangeness of dreaming on screen. Yet the not quite rightness lingers for days afterwards. Suddenly, twenty years after its original release, this much-maligned film really does seem worthy of a thousand viewings.