I'm going to go out on a small limb and say...there's a chance that Eyes Wide Shut may have been the first movie by Kubrick I saw. When I was this age, 13 or so, I was beginning to get really into film, and I might have recognized that this was a movie veteran, well known, and that this was his new film. Since I don't specifically remember seeing 2001 or Clockwork the first time, there is a very small chance I rented this when it was a new release and watched it, and it made me interested to his other movies.... just a possible situation. Not guaranteed.
Eyes Wide Shut will forever be remembered I think for three unfortunate things. Number one, Stanley Kubrick's last movie. Number two, the sex club part of the movie. Number three, it was Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a couple at the time, and they were having their first big film together, and they broke up soon afterwards. All these things have tainted the legacy of the film, but what is the movie besides these things? I hadn't seen it since the very early 2000's and I revisited it cause it's on Netflix.
First of all, it's not a great movie. Let me just start with that. You can't really expect every single thing the man touches to be gold, and the plot of this just doesn't bring loads to the table. What you have here is perhaps a fantastical and surreal vision of the falling apart of a married couple.
Nicole Kidman, as Alice early in the film admits to husband Tom Cruise, as Bill that she had fantasies about a man she saw randomly. In his pain and anger, he goes out into the night and eventually finds his friend and pianist Nick Nightingale at a club. He sticks around and they talk, Nick mentions he's going to another gig, that he has to be blindfolded for it, and there's a mystery to it. Pushed on by curiosity, Bill decides to attend the event, which is the big sex club scene about an hour into the movie. When he's discovered as someone not wanted there, he gets targeted and eventually threatened, then kicked out.
Aside from that 20 or so minutes of the movie, the rest is all pretty much based in reality. Bill is trying to cope with his distraught feelings after the admission of his wife, and in the meantime he's a busy doctor, begins to have suspicions and fear after the threats made at him in the club, especially when a woman he was talking to there ends up dead. But, spoilers here, the best part of the movie is the ambiguity it leaves as to the whole affair. The woman? A drug addict prostitute who possibly killed herself. The man following Bill? A tail his friend put on him to make sure Bill was safe and didn't endanger the sex cult. Eventually, his life returns to normalcy, he confesses all to his wife Alice, and though he has nothing really to confess to, it's all symbolic of how much he was willing to go through because of the admission she made earlier. And she forgives him, although I guess in a way it's her just acknowledging the true nature of what happened in the relationship.
Well acted, certainly well shot, with tremendous feelings of tension at time, and a lot of bizarre qualities to it, one still has to admit this movie felt unfocused. There's a lot of unnecessary parts to the film, and there's a lot of unclear motivation from Bill about what he's doing and why. When he goes to a prostitute in the beginning it makes sense. The sex cult makes sense. Revisiting the prostitute later and bringing her a gift, didn't make sense. Getting interested in a shopkeepers daughter, didn't make sense. Not to mention there's basically no need for any of the hospital scenes, for a lot in the beginning, and some other small things.
As a last film, since you can't really count A.I., this is a fairly weak end to the Kubrick legend. It is his look at relationships, I guess, and has some nice imagery and certainly will stick with you. But like I said, unfortunately, the brazen and twisted scenes at the sex club are the only things one will end up taking away from the film, and that actually has very little to do with the film in the end, and was more metaphoric in existence in the first place. It ends as it began, two rich white people who hit a minor bump in the road just keep on going, and we're left to assume everything is fine, and this was a brief diversion in the flawless lives of two beautiful, pretty much perfect peoples lives...
It's not an easy film to stick up for, and I kind of doubt I'll be in a rush to see it again. The sex party did remind me a lot of the kink scene I go to sometimes, but other than that, it held no real value for me. I give it 3 stars, mostly for the technically well made factors.
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