Eyes Wide Shut
# 3 Best of Film of 1999
Starring: Sam Douglas, Nicolde Kidman, Tom Cruise, Sydney Pollack, Todd Field, Rade Serbedzija, Leelee Sobieski, Vinessa Shaw, Alan Cumming, Marie Richardson, Thomas Gibson, Julienne Davis, and Louise J. Taylor
Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) reveals to her husband Bill (Tom Cruise) that their marriage has become "sad," too routine. "Why don't you ever get jealous of the men that want to take me to bed?" she asks.
"Do you love me just because I am beautiful and sexy?"
Bill unimpressively responds: "We are married, we have had a child together, and I trust you. Of course I love you."
So Alice reveals to him that she had an adulterous fantasy a year earlier while they were vacationing in Maine with their daughter, Helena. Alice had accidentally bumped into a young and handsome marine. Turning to apologize, their eyes made contact and "locked." Alice was enraptured by the event. She couldn't get it out of her head. "I felt that if he wanted me, I would give all I have--you, Helena, my life--for just one night with him."
When Bill hears Alice's revelation, he gets upset and leaves. Bill's time away from home becomes an epic journey complete with a realization of the meaning of love and relationships, mainly that he cannot always be in control; he has taken his marriage for granted; and temptation torments all humankind, even him. In mentioning the epic journey, I am reminded of Nathanial Hawthorne's character, Young Goodman Brown, who holds his wife on a higher standard than himself; and of Adam from the Book of Genesis, who is cast out of Eden for partaking of the fruit of good and evil and realizing sin.
Particularly, I am reminded of Aeneas, Odysseus, and other classical heroes who had to rediscover themselves by proving themselves, even if that route of rediscovery lead them through the depths of hell.
Like the classical heroes, Bill faces humiliation, temptation, and death in hell--a magnificently macabre mansion in which caped and masked guests perform sexual rituals. And he is redeemed and literally saved only because one of the guests offers her self as a sacrifice on his behalf. (This is truly one of the most haunting and unforgettable scenes in film.)
Eyes Wide Shut is a masterfully directed morality play about marriage and fidelity. Furthermore, it is a film full of human introspection, temptation, redemption, and forgiveness. Under the guise of temptation, Kubrick seems to say, anyone is capable of the fall.
On the technical side, Eyes Wide Shut looks, sounds, and feels like freelance poetry or stream-of-consciousness literature. The script is rich in symbolism and is spoken in abrupt, slow, and methodical spasms as if coming from a dream. Along this same line, Kubrick's characters are mere vehicles that focus on delivering the meaning behind the lines rather than on their actual meaning.
The scenes are richly splendid, both to look at and to read into. And like the stream-of-consciousness type literature, the scenes in Eyes are a cacophony of situations that compound one upon the other to make a symbolic whole, even though they appear centrifugal--another trademark of a Kubrick film.
A Christian proverb says that one should never cast pearls to swine. Eyes Wide Shut is a pearl, a visual and visceral masterpiece.
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