Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Stanley Kubrick and Frederick Raphael, based on the Arthur Schnitzler novella Traumnovelle
Starring Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Todd Field
USA, 1999
THE LAST LAUGH
I never thought there was anything really profound about the work of director Stanley Kubrick, on a straightforward level anyway. Maybe this was his “genius”; whatever is deep about his movies usually has to do with the friction between the aesthetic, visual part and the content. He had a background in photography, I believe, and this accounts for his startling way with the movie camera; he’s not shooting real life- the picture in the frame is too planned-out, too gorgeous, too perfect. In many ways, he was a very cinematic director, but few of the movies that came to define his frustrating style have the energy and vigor that draws most cinephiles into a love of the medium. His dead atmospheres collided with his dedication to big themes like social status in Barry Lyndon, probably his most breathtaking and underrated film. I always thought he was a little simple-minded. His early The Killing, which has a different style from what he came to be known for in the late ‘60s and onward, is a pleasurable toying with cutting and fracturing time- a little more fun than its French heist film counterpart Riffifi- that never rises above its conventions. Dr. Strangelove is an excellent satire but the laughs, as funny and finely constructed as they are, are self-conscious, not of the world and mood the film creates. His final film, Eyes Wide Shut, is the same sort of movie, one with jolts and thrills here and there that don’t really add up to anything more than juvenile, depthless mockery of the overprivileged.
This much toiled-over adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler novella seems to be mocking its own stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, one of Hollywood’s most high-profile couples at that time (only a couple years after playing a troubled husband and wife, they have ironically filed for divorce). The movie opens with Kidman undressing and baring her butt for the camera, as if she knows she has an audience. It ends with her delivering one of the best jokes in Kubrick’s entire oeuvre. Kubrick seems to be mighty cruel, making a laughingstock out of Cruise as the handsome and affluent Dr. Bill who tries to dig himself out of his wife’s feminist ditch and ends up drowning in her closet of skeletons. The pivotal scene comes after he and his wife Alice attend a party, thrown by Bill’s wealthy patient Ziegler (a venomously sweet Sydney Pollack), where the two engage in flirting with others. While they smoke pot in their room the next night, he pushes her buttons with naïve statements about how women don’t think about sex after they’ve had children or when they’re being felt up by doctors for cancer detection, and how men are all lusty pigs. As a retort, she reveals her secret, haunting fantasy about a naval officer she has never met.
Kidman basically picks up the film and runs away with it; she has so little screen time and you wish she’d show up in just a few more scenes because she adds intelligence, balance, and life to the heavily stylized film, a kind of ironic argumentative vibrancy and a feminist stance to spar with her motherly pent-up sexuality. (It’s a revelation when she appears fully dressed, though.) Cruise is the stooge, the seemingly unsuspecting butt of Kubrick’s naughty, immature gags. Trying to weasel his way out of trouble with his stoned wife when she asks why he has never been jealous of her, he says, exasperated, “I’m sure of you.” After Kidman’s entrancing monologue, Kubrick pulls another giggly prank by having the phone ring while holding on Cruise’s troubled, confused face.
So Eyes Wide Shut, which the two leads labored on for a number of years, is Kubrick satirizing rich Hollywood couples, just like he made fun of the dimwits in office with Strangelove. I think it’s often just as funny as that movie. Poor Tom is completely clueless, wandering through the dark New York underworld on a spiteful, impotent sexual odyssey. He’s taken home by a prostitute (Vinessa Shaw) but is interrupted by the phone just when they’re about to get it on. (One of Kubrick’s stupidest moves occurs when Tom discovers that the prostitute has AIDS and that he missed putting himself in grave danger by a hair; perhaps you can twist it around so it’ll become a statement on the risks of sex in the ‘90s, and how sex, no matter how casual, always has its perils… that is, if you can get past how lamely it’s presented.) He gets the address to a masked orgy at some mansion in Long Island, and the film’s centerpiece is the spooky, ridiculous sequence in which outsider Tom tries to get in on some of the action but is asked to disrobe because he isn’t a member of the elite sex club. There’s a lot of female flesh lying around, boobs exposed casually; the seedy sinfulness clashes with the stately building in which the proceedings take place. And just when you think Kubrick’s going to show us the film’s first penis (after all, it’s only fair that Cruise should have to strip if his wife has to parade around in the nude for a quarter of the time she’s in the movie), Dr. Bill is saved by some anonymous naked woman who wants to sacrifice herself for him. The sequence is raised from its intended sluggish somberness to the heights of camp; how else are we supposed to take that freaky, unimaginably unarousing chanting, and those hilarious digital figures that were placed in front of the more explicit sex in order to attain an R rating from the babyish, babying MPAA? Kubrick is one of the least erotic directors I can think of; he became so arty in his later years that all he could make were pretentious message movies, magnificent film poems that owed a lot to painting and photography, or, in this case, movies in between. Not only was the sex and violence in his movies numbing and completely toneless (as in A Clockwork Orange), but he also never achieved the eroticism of the movies in his mannered films. Maybe instead he achieved the alluring qualities of poetry and sculpting and photography and painting, but I don’t know enough about those arts to really tell.
The film is a battle of the sexes, the battle between dreams and reality, the mind and the body. Nicole Kidman has fantasies, and Tom Cruise lives out those fantasies (without ever really engaging in adulterous intercourse). Kubrick turned the joke on his conservative male audience (or can they even be caught seeing a film like this, which was hyped by the studio advertising as a new kind of porn flick?) when Cruise embodied that female-neutering mentality in the marijuana-confession scene, but he reverts back to similar ideals when he bestows on the film’s Female Center the honor of being the brain and heart of the movie, while he leaves the Masculine Side to do whatever he pleases with his body. It’s an interesting dilemma in this film, although it doesn’t create a hole as big as the moral problems did in A Clockwork Orange. Kidman stays home and dreams about having sex while Cruise goes out to look for it to get his revenge. Yet it’s Kidman who declares at the end that they must have sex to heal their marriage. The women are the emotionally open characters, the most sensitive ones; pot allows the bottled-up wife to let it rip and spill her guts out. The husband, who’s also smoked a joint, has a clear head but becomes a little defensive. The death of one of Dr. Bill’s patients causes the deceased man’s daughter to let down her guard and tell Bill that she loves him. There’s also a scene (one of the few that takes place during the daytime) that cuts between the doctor examining a naked female patient and the wife tending to their daughter Helena (Madison Eginton). Kubrick juxtaposes the cute innocence of the redhead girl with the sheer decadence of her parents, and the dull yellows and oranges with the deep dark blues of unlit rooms. They’re such easy contrasts and comparisons you’d think the director was a young newcomer. My favorite thing about Eyes Wide Shut was its sly suggestion that there’s more to parents than children know, that all moms and dads lead secret sex lives. When Bill and Alice take Helena Christmas shopping, there’s a sexual and emotional tension in the scene- they want to discuss the traumas they’ve just experienced- and the film plays on the idea of walking in on your parents, or the fear children have of knowing too much about their mother and father. It’s one of the few things that really creeped me out about the movie.
Kubrick’s New York was built on soundstages; the man hadn’t visited the city in decades when he was making this movie. The action and the setting are all in his head, and so are the connections he makes between male and female, dream and truth, sober and stoned. The people who thought this was going to be a feast of pretty, sexualized flesh were probably sorely disappointed; the most sexually graphic moment involving either Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman is Dr. Bill’s quick daydream of his wife and the naval officer having passionate sex, and even this wasn’t as explicit as the sex scene with Cruise and Kelly Preston in Jerry Maguire. And what’s more of a turnoff than intellectualizing sexuality? The thing I’ve learned about Kubrick is that his movies are dream movies; it now seems wrong of me to have criticized Full Metal Jacket for not being realistic. As impersonal as I thought they were, they are actually very personal, in the most distant and alienating way possible. We are let in on his thinking processes, what he feels about the world. His work was largely adaptations of other people’s writing but his personality came through in his casting choices, in the pacing, in the camera movement (or lack thereof). His marvelously clever choice of a famous movie-star couple as the leads and his exploitation of Tom Cruise’s charming shtick is his own satire on Hollywood love; the film takes obvious but humorous stabs at rich people who have nothing better to do with their money than spend it on lavish costumes and gothic orgies. The movie’s about the complexities of marriage, and how fantasizing cannot possibly end even after you’ve taken the wedding vows, and how discussing it in an adult, mature way can bring a couple together, but the film, intriguingly photographed by Larry Smith and Kubrick himself (with more camera movement and close-ups than is usual for a Kubrickian film), doesn’t quite work when it breaks its spell and turns the dream logic into something more than a farce on the confused wealthy; it becomes an outright sex farce. It completely gets us, though, with its final f-word punchline that emphasizes both the importance of sex in marriage and the American sex obsession. It adds to a long list of contradictions that made the Kubrick style: Eyes Wide Shut is one of the least sexy sex farces I’ve ever seen, but also a very hypnotic one.
By Andrew Chan [JULY 21, 2001]