Eyes Wide Shut **** (1999, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack) – Classic Movie Review 269

It’s 1999, and, when the screen’s then most famous married couple, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, teams up with one of the great film directors – Stanley Kubrick – you expect sparks to fly or even a special kind of magic to be conjured up.

Kubrick’s erotic thriller, his first movie in 12 years since Full Metal Jacket in 1987, turned out to be his final film. And it certainly smoulders, even if it only occasionally truly catches fire. Cruise is rather improbably cast as a wealthy New York doctor, Dr William Harford, who spends one bizarre night that climaxes at an occult-style orgy at a country house, after his lovely, art curator wife Alice (Kidman) taunts him with the idea that she may have had an affair.  He starts to have increasingly paranoid thoughts…

Kidman’s character is into taking her clothes off, flirting and smoking pot, which livens up her section of the movie no end. And the orgy that Cruise attends is certainly an eye-popper, even if it looks more like a Sixties Hammer horror film version of an orgy than the real thing. Its supposed excesses seem tame enough but gained it an 18 certificate in the UK.

However, Kubrick’s farewell film is a shade disappointing. (He died in 1999, aged 70.) At 159 minutes, it’s way overlong, sometimes slackly paced (or even slow-moving) in its admittedly intended dream-like way and it’s self-consciously arty. So you might find your eyes wide shut for some of the time.

Even so, there’s a lot to recommend it and it’s still one to watch for its handsome production, some highly intriguing ideas in the rather old-fashioned script by Kubrick and Frederick Raphael and Kidman’s excellent performance. Larry Smith’s cinematography and Jocelyn Pook’s score are outstanding, too. If any film can be said to be too meticulous, this is it.

There’s nudity (not on display from Cruise, though), simulated sex, drug use and swearing.

Sydney Pollack replaced a fed-up Harvey Keitel as Victor Ziegler when the filming ran on and on into its second year, with the stars at the peak of their fame and careers desperately chewing at the bit as bizarrely Kubrick had an open-ended contract for their time. Pollack gives a striking performance.

Based on Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle (Dream Novel), Eyes Wide Shut was a long-cherished project for Kubrick. Interesting though it is, you get the feeling that he just left it too late to film it and that it might have been great 30 years earlier.

After two years of production in unprecedented conditions of security and privacy, Eyes Wide Shut was finally released on September 10 1999. Kubrick hailed it as his best film but he took so long to make it he didn’t live to see it released to a very mixed reception from the critics and the public.

All the secrecy of the actual filming mixed with the over-publicity of the movie and its stars somehow backfired. However, a lot of the reviews were positive and it ended up taking a respectable $55million in the US, £5million in the UK and $162million worldwide, the highest grossing Kubrick film.

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© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 269

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