Eyes Wide Shut was, without doubt, Kubrick’s most personal picture; it was also, in the director’s estimate, his greatest. It is hard to argue with that assessment, although four or five films could easily stake a claim to that title. The nominal narrative belies the depths of this movie’s prodigious ambition and profundity, as the stakes appear to fall well short of epic, especially in comparison with Kubrick’s landmark reflections about World War I (Paths of Glory, 1957), the prospect of nuclear annihilation (Dr. Strangelove, 1964) and the possibilities of human evolution (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968).
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Stanley Kubrick’s final masterpiece, Eyes Wide Shut, has been reissued in a stunning new edition by the Criterion Collection. In addition to serving up a banquet of irresistible special features, this beautiful 4K restoration, supervised by director of photography Larry Smith, recaptures the film’s visual glory as seen in theaters on its release, an improvement especially noticeable in early sequences that had purposefully pressed the limits of its film stock.
Eyes Wide Shut was, without doubt, Kubrick’s most personal picture; it was also, in the director’s estimate, his greatest. It is hard to argue with that assessment, although four or five films could easily stake a claim to that title. The nominal narrative belies the depths of this movie’s prodigious ambition and profundity, as the stakes appear to fall well short of epic, especially in comparison with Kubrick’s landmark reflections about World War I (Paths of Glory, 1957), the prospect of nuclear annihilation (Dr. Strangelove, 1964) and the possibilities of human evolution (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968).
In contrast, Eyes Wide Shut could be described as concerning a modest disruption in the marital happiness of an extremely attractive couple of privilege: Alice (Nicole Kidman, one of the great actors of her generation) and Bill Harford (Tom Cruise, who, for a few precious moments at the turn of the century, sought out projects commensurate with his talent). That these movie stars were married to each other at the time, and set themselves in Kubrick’s secretive hands for a shooting schedule of record-shattering length, added to the film’s intrigue.
Alice and Bill are well off but not wealthy – although Bill’s concierge-style medical practice (and, presumably, Alice’s art gallery connections) often place them in the company of the ultra-rich. And it is after attending one such opulent event, in which each is separately presented with a sexual opportunity, that the couple, in its wake, are first aroused but subsequently combative. In a superbly choreographed bedroom confrontation (note especially the hot blue lights coming from the windows that frame Alice, similar to a technique Kubrick deployed in The Killing (1955) and which establish an essential visual motif here), she, frustrated and angry, taunts the otherwise unflappable Bill with a vivid confession of a moment in their past when she was overwhelmed with passion for a man with whom she exchanged a passing glance. Alice recounts, convincingly (Kidman’s monologue here is beyond praise), how close she was to abandoning her husband and child to throw herself into the arms of this stranger.
Alice’s revelation sets the movie in motion, as Bill, who might have benefited from having thicker skin, is unable to prevent himself from imagining, vividly, what that encounter might have looked like. He embarks, if initially without intending to, on a series of increasingly fantastic (and invariably unrequited) sexual encounters, punctuated by routine interactions that nevertheless have an incongruous sexual charge to them. Bill’s experiences have a dreamlike quality, especially one involving an infamous, foreboding orgy sequence. His ethereal reality is mirrored by the verisimilitude of Alice’s dreams, the details of one, which she shares, dramatically and graphically extends the imagination of her infidelity and his sexual humiliation.
All of Stanley Kubrick’s films age extremely well. His precision and purpose become increasingly apparent over time, and with repeated viewings. Eyes Wide Shut is an exemplar of this, having been twice misunderstood. On release, it was met with a mixed critical reception, due to a misleading marketing campaign and audience expectations at the time, both of which hinted at the film as an erotic thriller (a popular lascivious genre of the 1990s) as well as the promise of a peek behind the curtain at the real sex lives of its celebrity stars. And surely it was a monumental task to live up to the expectations set by the twelve-year gap following Full Metal Jacket (1987). Stumbling from the screening room and writing under deadline, many critics mocked the icy sexuality of the movie’s legendary orgy sequence, perhaps missing the point of the menace in that setting – note the bravura sequencing of the masks – and the motivation for its cool and eerie visual stylizing. Some were quick to dismiss Kubrick as an old man out of touch, and not just about sex but about the questionable authenticity regarding the portrayal of New York City’s Greenwich Village in the 1990s. Which, however accurate an observation, did not much matter then, and is irrelevant a quarter of a century later.
Some critics at the time saw past these superficialities. Janet Maslin’s brilliant, long-form review in the New York Times was one of the few that understood the movie on release, and legend holds that controversy surrounding her call contributed to her decision to step away from serving as the paper’s chief film critic. Over time, however, her assessment of it as a “brilliantly provocative tour de force” and her ability to see it in cinematic terms, as it was intended, has been vindicated. Eyes Wide Shut “overpoweringly deploys certain colors, most notably red and blue,” Maslin observed. Subsequently, “the advent of purple, first on the dress of a young prostitute and later on the sheets where Alice sleeps, has its own innate drama.”
Kubrick films feature meticulous attention to detail and radiate with compelling authority, which is why he is revered by so many cinephiles. Those same qualities, unfortunately, often excite the imagination of the conspiracy minded, a regrettable phenomenon exacerbated in the age of social media. There are many, for example, who are convinced that he faked the moon landings. (All good Kubrick followers are trained to concede the point but explain that he was such a perfectionist he shot on location.) This same mysterious sway has also led to misreadings of Eyes Wide Shut not only in its moment but over the ensuing decades as well. Legions of internet conspiracy theorists have latched onto the film as proof of . . . exactly what is not clear. And many more sober-minded viewers now see the story as an expose of the U.S. in the 1990s, and, more darkly, about the sexual indiscretions – and much, much worse – of American elites in the late Clinton era.
Although movies can – and should – take on lives of their own, we do know, definitively, that these were not Kubrick’s intentions. He moved to Britain in 1961 to shoot Lolita (1962) and soon decided to settle there permanently (his last voyage to America likely took place in 1968). Ensconced in that base of operations – and ultimately settling in sprawling Childwickbury Manor – his interests remained focused on the grand existential questions of the human condition, as reflected in his extensively researched but ultimately unrealized projects Napoleon, The Aryan Papers, and AI. And his aspiration, as an artist, was to advance the form of pure cinematic expression.
Moreover, the 1990s were not remotely on Kubrick’s mind with Eyes Wide Shut. As well documented by Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams in Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (2019), the project captured his imagination for practically the entirety of his professional life. Kubrick read the source material, Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, in the mid-1950s. In 1959 he reached out to Jules Feiffer about collaborating on an adaptation of the story; that same year he spoke with Schnitzler’s grandson, whom he invited to visit the set of Spartacus (1960), and expressed interest in acquiring the rights to some of his grandfather’s work. Kubrick finally secured those rights in 1968, and in 1971 Warner Bros. announced that Traumnovelle would be Kubrick’s next film.
The director was eager to set the picture in New York, not the Big Apple of the 1990s, obviously, but not even the New York of the 1970s. “I love the city,” he told the New York Times in 1972, “at least that is, I love the city as it used to be.” Kubrick, who was born in 1928 and lived in Greenwich Village in the early 1950s, would situate the movie in the New York of his nostalgic imagination. But he could not quite nail the adaptation to his satisfaction. One reason may have been, as his wife Christiane expressed in interviews over the years, that this was a project one should only pursue much later in life – as would ultimately be the case. In any event, Kubrick’s next film would be A Clockwork Orange (1971). But rarely was his mind far from Traumnovelle, whose narrative challenges he discussed with Anthony Burgess in 1976; in 1979 he talked to Steve Martin about playing lead role; in 1983 he exchanged letters with Terry Southern about the project, then called Rhapsody.
What is noteworthy about Eyes Wide Shut, and further underscores its timelessness, is the extent to which it is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Schnitzler’s novella, which was published in 1926 and set in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Kubrick’s film hews very closely to every major plot point of the source material, in sequence, as well as innumerable minor details, such as former med school chum turned pianist Nightingale (Todd Field) having four children; it also retains more than a dozen of the book’s most critical lines, including “if you men only knew” and “no dream is just a dream.” This point-to-point tracking is also evident in Wolfgang Glück’s 1969 adaptation for Austrian television, again, in every crucial detail: the confession, the patient, the prostitute, the costumer, the opulent orgy, the dreams, the warnings, the newspaper, the morgue, the mask, the resolution.
Kubrick’s only significant departure from Traumnovelle was the invention of the Zeigler character (Sydney Pollack, outstanding), which was likely the solution to his struggles with the adaptation (especially with regard to “the third act”) that so vexed him over the years. As Billy Wilder once lectured, if you have a problem in the third act, you have a problem in the first act. Thus the Zeigler character (whom some critics found too tidying) appears twice in the film, early and late, to resolve the structural difficulties Kubrick was wresting with – but even in those scenes key points draw on ideas expressed elsewhere in the novella.
Knowing what the film is expressly not about raises the question, what is Eyes Wide Shut about? Three things, actually. At its most basic level, it is about the challenges of marriage and fidelity, a theme in which Kubrick had a long-standing interest; he drafted the unproduced screenplays “Jealously” and “A Perfect Marriage” in the mid-1950s. In 1972 Kubrick told the legendary French critic Michel Ciment that Traumnovelle “explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage.” A key word is “happy” – one motivation for the relative material comfort of the Harfords, as well as the absence of any of life’s all too common stressors, is that by peeling away all of those possible difficulties, one is left solely with the challenges of marriage incarnate, not of a marriage under pressure. As Christiane Kubrick observed, “we are a pair-bonding species, but we live a long time.”
Kubrick also told Ciment that Schnitzler was “psychologically brilliant” and “greatly admired by [his contemporary] Sigmund Freud.” This is very high praise from Kubrick, who was deeply influenced by Freud, an imprint that plainly marks his films. Dr. Strangelove, for example, is profoundly shaped by the concerns found in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930); many commentators have noted the inspiration of Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919) on The Shining (1980). Eyes Wide Shut is overtly steeped in two Freudian themes: the relationships between sex and death, and between dreams and reality.
The enmeshment of sex and death is both obvious and subtle. The former is seen most plainly in Bill’s interrupted encounter with a prostitute (Vinessa Shaw) who subsequently learns she is HIV-positive (in the novella it is syphilis), and with the frank nudity of Mandy, unconscious in the wake of a sexual encounter with Zeigler, which anticipates her lifeless, naked corpse at the morgue, and of course with the theatrical sacrifice and salvation that take place at the orgy. But once you are looking for them, the connections between sex and death are everywhere. When Alice, in her angry confrontation with Bill, suggests that a patient might become aroused during a breast examination, he insists that they are not, “if for no better reason, because she’s afraid of what I might find.” And most bizarre is the sudden and unexpected profession of love for Bill by Marion (Marie Richardson) with her father’s fresh corpse in the background between them. Kubrick’s frame compositions, impeccable in this scene and throughout the film, are another strength of Eyes Wide Shut, and on par with his wondrously crafted constructions in Barry Lyndon (1975).
Finally, there is that very Freudian interest in the relationship between dreams and reality. (Schnitzler’s novella was called Dream Story for a reason.) The narratives of both story and film conclude with the acknowledgment that the border between dreams and reality is a nebulous one. This underscores the significance of Alice’s dreams but also invites the reconsideration that Eyes Wide Shut, even in its waking moments, is simultaneously a dreamscape. Both dialogue and action are constantly echoed in a way that is more consistent with dreams than reality – Bill seems to spend most of his time repeating things others say to him. More ethereal still is all the doubling of events, common in a dream cycle, including the two visits to Domino’s apartment and the two trips to the costumer (Rade Sherbedgia). Other echoes are more subtle but suggest a subconscious imagination. Bill is promised a trip to “where the rainbow ends,” which also reflects the name of the shop he subsequently visits; Alice’s laughter at the end of her dream parallels her laughing fit during their marital spat; Bill leaves that argument abruptly, announcing that he has to “show my face” – which he will do again when forced to remove his mask at the orgy. And it is, of course, Alice’s discovery of that fallen mask that leads to Bill’s shattered (and echoed) confession: “I’ll tell you everything, I’ll tell you everything.” Whether that catharsis, and the subsequent profession that they are now at last fully awake, will save their marriage is an open question.
The outstanding extras on the Criterion edition include insightful and informative new interviews with key collaborators on the film; archival interviews with other intimate affiliates, including Christiane Kubrick, Katharina Kubrick, and producer Jan Harlan; a lengthy press conference with Kidman and Cruise; and an excellent feature documentary from 2014 (Kubrick Remembered). These welcome additions enhance the appreciation of a film to be treasured.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
