Eyes Wide Shut
dir. Stanley Kubrick
Warner Bros.

After months of speculation and slavering promotion, Eyes Wide Shut, the last work of the late Stanley Kubrick, has arrived. How would Kubrick do sex in the '90s with Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and a title worthy of Jean-Claude Van Damme? It's like the art-house answer to the Phantom Menace hype.

There are certain words one is prepared to use when talking about Kubrick: eccentric, obsessive, genius, misanthropic, sick, funny, weird, classic. Eyes, unfortunately, falls somewhere near irritating, not far from boring. There's no choice but to speak ill of the dead and ask impertinent questions about the emperor's clothes.

Kubrick seems to be looking for scenes from a real marriage, the little moments that reveal the everyday deceptions that define — and bind — a couple, that darker truth behind the wedding vows and placid good-night kisses. The film opens with Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) sitting on a toilet in her evening gown; later, Kubrick shoots the couple's intimate conversations in cold morning light to make a brutal study of the the person you wake up with.

Cruise plays Bill Harford, a physician to New York socialite types. He and ex-gallery owner Alice live in on Central Park West with a daughter who is sugar-and-spice perfect. Though they are nine years married and liberal enough to keep a bag of pot in the medicine cabinet (in a Band-Aid box), one fantasized infidelity is enough to send them reeling into a world of strangely anachronistic sexual temptations.

And what a shrill and melodramatic fantasy it is. Alice confesses that last summer, while vacationing at the seaside, she was overcome by longing for a handsome naval officer. Indeed, she was prepared to give up her whole life to risk an encounter. What might she have done if the stranger hadn't been called away by an urgent message?

As Kidman delivered her confession in breathless, Gothic romance style, something about it struck me as pure 19th century naivete. Maybe it was because Allice was prompted to confess after a scene at a society ball, where she was wooed by a ludicrously suave Hungarian count. It was all so bad, it almost called for smelling salts.

Running from images of his wife and the naval officer, Bill Harford wanders into his own sexual odyssey. He finds himself drawn into the life of a street prosititute and a nymphet whose father pimps her from his costume shop. (Kubrick still knows Lolita when he sees her). Harford is undeniably drawn to both women, whose skin, hair and eyes vaguely echo his wife's. This ever-so-retro fascination with women as either wives or whores — and his inability to cope when the line blurs — reinforces the anachronistic undercurrent. The palpable desire between Harford and these two women is never truly dangerous either. Monogamy brings him to heel without a whimper.

Eventually, Harford is drawn into a high-society orgy, which shouldn't be mistaken for the most important part of the movie (I can't argue about this without telling you too much). It's cleverly set up to generate suspense. Uninvited, Harford is walking into a blind trap. Like the character, the audience can't decide whether to be more aroused by sexual depravity (if only it were as good as that) or the fear of discovery.

But while scene creates sinister promise with cloaked figures and carnival masks and naked women (Kubrick still has an eye for the female body as pure meat), Bill barely makes it past the lobby. It's irrelevant. The terror is mostly in his own mind, compounded later by marital guilt and paranoia when his exploits are echoed in his wife's dreams. For the next days, he tiptoes through his own life, looking for ways to hide the evidence but still gawking at hookers like he's never seen women before.

On paper, it sounds like a vintage Kubrick mindgame, and it sometimes works, but ultimately there's something about it that doesn't ring true. What's more, the decadence lacks any moments of jolting original imagery. The man who created the hyperbolic menace of The Shining and a rapist warbling "Singin' in the Rain" owes us more.

Maybe it comes back to the anachronism problem. I've never read Arthur Schnitzler's "Traumnovelle," the book that inspired this film, but I am willing to guess that some of its period sensibility taints this adaptation. Bill and Alice's identity crisis hits bottom too fast because they are never developed beyond an exotic porcelain doll and an oblivious bourgeois mate, what Victorians might have called a hysteric and a hypocritical prig. Kubrick can't bring these archetypes to mesh with the contemporary setting, and it's totally at odds with the honest chemistry between the married stars.

Kubrick thoroughly bungles his understanding of those two, although you might not guess it from the way the couple has been touting The Last Kubrick Film like they bagged a trophy head of an endangered species.

Cruise's virile, action-oriented persona doesn't allow him to play Dr. Harford as a character actor should. Emotionally shattered by the cheapness of human desire? Cancel your afternoon appointments and rub your temples harder! That's to say, Stanley, he's no Olivier, maybe not even Tony Curtis.

Kidman steals all the scenes with her gorgeous presence. She might just be too much woman for Kubrick, who cannot coherently channel her intuitive gifts — especially her shrewdness and strength — to round out a complicated sexual persona. Instead, she hairpins from ingenue to wife to siren and her character ends up looking schizophrenic.

Ultimately, I think its appropriate to cast aside reflected reverence for Kubrick's body of work and feel free to say this film is a disappointment. The Harfords just never burn the screen down. The film settles for something less than the dark heart of the institution of marriage. It's far more deflated and pedestrian. (Is he trying to tell us that Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus?) If he meant the pair to be unsympathetic, he is capable of greater feats with comic scorn or truly acid ironies. Kubrick never seemed one to suffer fools like this before.

— Megan Christensen (mmc3e4 at mizzou dot edu)