It’s funny that what was the most anticipated movie of the summer of 1999 turned out to be a bonafide art film, but Stanley Kubrick always did surprise his audience. The melancholy surrounding the July release of Eyes Wide Shut was due to the fact that its director had died, in his sleep, several months before. The obsessive and meticulous filmmaker tended to benign indifference when it came to self-care, and it caught up to him in the form of a heart attack. Contemplating his passing, many of us recalled an exchange that occurred between two German filmmakers at the funeral of the well-liked cinematic genius Ernst Lubitsch. “No more Lubitsch,” one said sadly. “Worse, no more Lubitsch pictures,” the other countered.
In March of ’99, when Kubrick died, I’d just started writing reviews on a monthly basis at Premiere magazine. I’d been on staff there for a couple years already, but my tenure as “Chief Film Critic” was new, and experimental. Because Premiere was a monthly magazine with, at the time, only a print presence, there was concerns that my reviews might not be sufficiently timely. Indie movies weren’t a problem, but getting access to big tentpole releases might be an issue. We proceeded with a kind of “if you build it, they will come” optimism. And sure enough, we got access. But it was often last-minute access. I found myself working with the mag’s art director to make space where I’d slot in a particular review, to be written overnight if not more quickly, that we’d drop in to the issue mere hours before we shipped to the printer. The Talented Mr. Ripley was one nail-biter. Months before that, Eyes Wide Shut was another.
I went to the screening prepared. I’d learned that the movie, for which Kubrick had spent seemingly endless months with his then-power-couple lead actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, was to be based on Traumnovelle, a 1926 novella by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. So I went out and read a translation. The bones of the movie are there: a young doctor, successful and attractive with a beautiful little family, is thrown into psychic tumult by a confession of erotic fantasy from his wife. He then enters a nightworld of sexual lures: a prostitute, a degenerate costume merchant pimping his own daughter, and finally, a secret-society orgy where a human sacrifice appears to be part of the revels. He survives, returning home harrowed and chastened.
But the substance of the movie is different from the get-go. Kubrick chose not to film the novella as a period piece but to set it in the contemporary world. Not Austria, but New York. And most crucially, not actual New York — Kubrick had not left England, where he took up residence after completing 2001: A Space Odyssey in the late ’60s, in almost three decades — but a New York of Kubrick’s own imagination and memory. Unlike a lot of the critics who took the director to task for a supposed lack of realism, Kubrick himself never lost sight of the fact that he was filming what had literally been titled a “dream novel.”
Its first shot is absolutely Kubrickean and at the same time unlike anything he’d ever done — which can be said for the movie as a whole. The white-on-black credits begin, accompanied by the strains of Shostakovich. Then there’s a shot of Kidman in a room by a closet in an apartment, classical pillars framing her, as she stands before a window and slips out of a dress, revealing herself to be naked underneath. It’s a version of Kubrick’s famed “one-point-perspective” shot, albeit more scintillating — not just because of content, but because Kidman is not perfectly centered in the frame.
The movie’s frankness continues as Cruise and Kidman’s couple, Bill and Alice Harford, prepare for a semi-formal evening out. After asking for Alice’s help in finding his wallet (hence establishing Alice as the more organized party in the marriage; Cruise’s relative boyishness is at the forefront for most of his performance), he walks in on her while she’s sitting on the toilet. Kubrick insists on acknowledging earthiness even as he establishes elegance.
The spectacular array of white and multi-colored lights at the Christmas party Bill and Alice attend — yes, Eyes Wide Shut is also a Christmas movie — once more show off Kubrick’s penchant for using available light and creating the most interesting available light for the occasion. The diffusion gives the scene a creamy, and yes, dreamy feel, and in that atmosphere comes the movie’s first bit of comedy, Alice’s flirtation with the ridiculous Euro-cliché Sandor Szavost, played by Sky DuMont. “Did you ever read the Latin poet Ovid, on the art of love?” Sandor asks Alice right off the bat. This amuses her, but it’s also clear she’s feeling a little coltish. In the meantime Bill is practically shanghaied by two twenty-something vixens before being summoned by his host, who wants him to…well, wants him to see about a “little accident” involving a voluptuous nude woman passed out from a drug overdose.
This is the first “WTF” moment of the movie. As Ziegler, played by the director Sydney Pollack (the role had been begun by Harvey Keitel, but Keitel, exasperated by Kubrick’s multiple takes, stormed off the set), explains the situation, he stands in front of a painting of another voluptuous nude woman. The artwork is by Kubrick’s wife, Christiane. You could write a whole book on the unusual doublings that fill this movie.
The Harford’s unusual night out sets them to musing about the life of the erotic, so to speak — Alice wants to know what was going on in his mind while examining a voluptuous naked woman, and also, what might be going on in the mind of the woman. Did she feel a desire for him? “Women…just…don’t…think like that,” Bill insists. And Alice, in a rage, insists that they sure do. And her detailed avowal sends Bill down that rabbit hole of a night world.
The journey is funny and harrowing and ultimately moving. It shows Bill the essential banality of his own fantasy life, and what he needs to regain in order to make himself and his marriage whole again. Of all of Kubrick’s films, it’s the most optimistic; after getting to the edge of an abyss, Bill can pull himself back, and despite his childlike vulnerability at the point where he has to confront where he’s been, the movie’s blunt final dialogue exchange offers the hope of renewal.
When the picture was screened for critics in New York, it was introduced by Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s brother-in-law, who told the assembled critics that Warner Brothers was putting digital shadows in front of some figures during the (now infamous) orgy scene to avoid a commercially disastrous NC-17 rating from the MPAA. They were not in the film at this screening, however, and they are not on the Blu-ray from Warners, and thank God.
For all that, the picture did confound a lot of my colleagues. One in particular thought, obscured or not, the bodies in the orgy resembled nothing more than a softcore assemblage you might see on Cinemax. I took the artificiality of the masked and idealized figures differently — that is, as dream figures, phantoms of the pornographic imagination. The movie features, prominently, a piece of music by Gyorgy Ligeti, the Hungarian-born 20th century composer who was a great favorite of Kubrick’s (Ligeti actually sued the filmmaker when he used some of his music without authorization for 2001, but they patched things up nicely, particularly I reckon when Ligeti realized residuals and publicity could only do him good). It’s a piano piece in which one note is struck insistently, with a long pause in between (Ligeti had stated that each repetition represented a middle finger to Stalin, or words to that effect). This, too, drove some critics nuts. And critics who didn’t understand the significance of the orgy masks — derived from Venetian carnival wear, and one of them very specifically denoting plague — carped about that, too. The movie’s reception overall was pretty solidly in the “I don’t get it” camp. I had certainly sensed that vibe leaving the screening.
And me? Well, I sped back to my office and turned out a reasonably short review (all the space we had in the section after the initial layout) in which I quoted Pete Townshend. Yes, the rock star, the Who guitarist and songwriter, the most long-windedly eloquent man in rock and roll, who in the ‘60s was invited by Rolling Stone to review another singular work, the debut album from King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King. Townshend called the album “an uncanny masterpiece,” and I did the same with Kubrick’s final movie. I hold that verdict to this day. And the fact that we’re commemorating its 25th anniversary means that others hold it today, and they should.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.