Focus of 'Eyes' is on fear

Stanley Kubrick's last film doesn't give viewers a voyeuristic thrill; instead, it brilliantly shows us where our insecurities could lead.

By STEVE PERSALL Times Film Critic

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 16, 1999

Little has been revealed about Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, to this point, a decision that the late artist carried to his grave and others have carried on. Even those cryptic ads on TV, especially the bombshell clip that showed co-stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman naked and nuzzling, have been misleading.

Rumors have hatched in place of confirmed information. Those rumors seem like the best place to begin any first-impression review of Eyes Wide Shut.

Cruise does not appear naked, or wearing a dress, or portraying necrophilia. The obsession of his character, a Manhattan doctor named Bill Harford, is much more internalized and shattering than that. Kidman, as Bill's wife, Alice, never participates in any of the sexual adventures her husband encounters in one curiously decadent night.

If you're panting to get a voyeuristic peek into the sex lives of these married Hollywood superstars, forget it. This isn't the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee home video. Even that 90-second clip of the actors fooling around that Kubrick allowed to be released is truncated in the final cut. Sixty-five seconds of the most graphic sex has been digitally camouflaged in the version Americans will see.

There will be people who will hesitate to see Eyes Wide Shut for that reason. It's precisely that sort of cultural immaturity about sex that forced Kubrick to tone down his film for R-rated domestic release, while Europeans can watch it unedited. Nobody will snicker there, or leave disappointed that they didn't see two celebrities actually having sex. No watchdogs of decency will be telling them that they're damned for attending the show.

They will likely see Eyes Wide Shut for what Kubrick intended it to be.

Eyes Wide Shut Grade: A Director: Stanley Kubrick Cast: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Todd Field, Rade Serbedzija, Marie Richardson, Leelee Sobieski Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Frederic Raphael, based the book Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler Rating: R; sexual situations, nudity, profanity Running time: 159 min.

Related Links Through Kubrick's eyes Official Eyes Wide Shut Web site

Because Eyes Wide Shut, as Kubrick's widow and closest confidante, Christiane, has said, isn't about sex. She said it was all about fear. Certainly, that emotion consumes Bill after he takes his sexual curiosity to the limit he can stand before the danger becomes too great. Doesn't everyone have his limit, whether it's fear of getting caught by a spouse, or fear of catching a disease, or fear that a one-night stand could ruin a previously stable relationship? Bill's fear in Eyes Wide Shut is a symptom of his insecurities. Sex isn't his life, or Kubrick's primary target here.

Kubrick is probing for something harder to locate than sex, and that's intimacy. By textbook definition, the two are entwined. In Bill and Alice's experiences, sex and intimacy have split apart. They're intimate enough to use the bathroom in front of each other, but not to the degree that they share every secret. By all accounts, Kubrick and his wife enjoyed complete devotion. That may explain why Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, with its observation of people who can't achieve that intimate level, fascinated him for so many years.

Alice has a secret, conveyed in a stunning scene that marks Kidman's arrival into the ranks of "serious actors." When Alice shares it with Bill, the disintegration of everything he has believed about their marriage will make him test his sexual limits. He doesn't know it, and it takes the audience a while to catch on, but Kubrick has been testing Bill's limits since the movie began an hour before.

When Eyes Wide Shut begins, Bill and Alice are preparing to attend a Christmas party hosted by a friend (Sydney Pollack, who replaced Harvey Keitel when Kubrick's shooting schedule dragged on too long). Alice gets tipsy and mildly tempted by a dashing stranger, while Bill basks in the seductive attention of a pair of models. Flirting is Bill's first temptation. From there, a medical crisis will make him a bystander to his friend's infidelity. At each turn, Kubrick raises the stakes for Bill, until he can't back out of the game.

When they return home, Bill and Alice smoke a joint and make small talk about the party. Stoned leaps of logic cause an argument, culminating in Alice's confession that she once contemplated having an affair. She didn't come close to doing it, but Bill has never believed her capable of those thoughts before. He leaves to make a house call and detours into sexual obsessions ranging from a misguided crush to an elaborate secret society with kinky rituals and costumes.

Knowing that he's gone too far, Bill starts retracing his steps through this erotic underworld, partly because he's stumbled upon a mystery that could cost his life and partly because he still feels a need to have his virility stoked again. Each repeat visit reveals another downfall of sex without intimacy: people don't share secrets, their mutual feelings are corrupted by money. Eyes Wide Shut is Bill's debauched odyssey as an observer. We see ourselves, or what we could be, under the wrong circumstances.

Kubrick's exacting way with actors elicited great performances from Cruise and Kidman. Both actors drop the affectations that made them stars to become more flesh-and-blood than any of their films have allowed before. Cruise, in particular, has never appeared as naturally unnerved as he does here. Kidman's role isn't as large as expected, but she's meticulously subtle in whatever she's asked to do. Supporting characters pop in as plot devices, but there's something special about Kubrick's tone that gives us unspoken knowledge about what they've done and what they'll do next.

Each frame of Eyes Wide Shut carries the mark of the master. His trademark tracking shots are still evocative tools, carrying us from the burnished glow of affluence to neon-drenched sex shops along Bill's misguided way. Then, Kubrick will lock down his camera for a lingering look into an actor's face or a tense exchange, and the effect is unmistakable. Painstaking set design, including Kubrick's reproduction of Manhattan streets on a backlot in England, is completely convincing.

It should be noted that the same secrecy Kubrick applied to Eyes Wide Shut poses a problem for most film critics. This review was written within three hours after a Wednesday screening of the film, a late date compared to most films. Kubrick demanded that Warner Bros. follow that schedule for all but the top national publications. Fans will agree that it's nearly impossible to glean everything from a Kubrick film after only one viewing, and especially in such a short time.

Eyes Wide Shut will certainly be replayed in my mind's eye until the chance to see it again comes along. I have a feeling that it will only get better with each viewing. That's the beauty of Kubrick's art, that it isn't disposable. The cumulative effect of his garish designs, daring visuals and challenging ideas takes time to develop, always adding some new sense of discovery. If you didn't grieve over Kubrick's death in March, perhaps the fact that he'll never surprise us like this again will do the trick.