Eyes Wide Shut: Unrated
Stanley Kubrick’s final film is at once both confounding and astonishing, telling a story that never makes itself all too clear all for the final moral being pretty simplistic: If you’re married to someone who loves you, you NEVER take it for granted. Cruise is the star of the movie no doubt, but it’s Kidman in a (much) smaller role who is the heart of the film. Her big confession of how she considered cheating on him is the acting highlight of the piece. Cruise’s performance is a bit more subdued, as he’s playing more of an everyman character than his usual roles where he’s playing “The One”, but the story is centered around the macabre journey he takes when his own ego and self-confidence about his marriage is shattered due to what his wife says. Indeed, many have wondered whether the unfolding events are in fact a dream, when in reality everything is basically a metaphor: the AIDS-infected prostitute he nearly sleeps with, the scumbag costume store owner who shamelessly pimps out his own under-aged daughter, and of course the infamous “sex cult” he encounters. They all represent the ugliness and perils that a man can encounter when he decides to try to step out of the realms of his marriage into a decadent world he’s better off sheltering himself from. At 159 minutes, the film moves rather fast, although I could have done without Alan Cumming’s terrible overdone cameo as a hotel clerk, shamelessly drooling over Cruise every second they’re on screen together. The piano score is intriguing at first, but soon turns ridiculous as it becomes ever so repetitive. A big concern for me is how Kubrick brings out Sydney Pollack for a long 15 minute scene at the end, basically explaining away everything we’ve seen, while still leaving questions unanswered (Was the piano player REALLY sent home to his family? Did the hooker who “redeemed” Cruise really OD coincidentally??). Obviously the film might have been better suited to cut out this pat explanation altogether and just leave us wondering how close to doom Cruise really came. As I said before though, Kidman is the saving grace of the story, and the most intriguing question (was she somehow connected to the sex cult at one time?) never even remotely gets answered. In the end, the master’s final work comes off best as a paean to the tranquility of married life…
8/10