Sean Burns
I had been a professional film critic for a little more than four months when Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was released in July of 1999. Our press screening was held at a dumpy, dearly-missed arthouse five-plex that within a couple of years would be absorbed and demolished by Boston University. Kubrick had died of a massive heart attack days after completing the film in early March, though rumors at the time persisted that the mysterious director had faked his death. I remember noting that our screening was itself proof such theories were bunk, because had he still been alive, presentation perfectionist Kubrick would never have allowed his film to be screened for reviewers in an auditorium locally renowned for a large, ugly seam running down the center-right of the screen. However, the “Stanley’s still alive” stories were hardly the strangest nor silliest rumors that had been swirling around Eyes Wide Shut for the past few years.
Still ranked in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest continuous film shoot in movie history, principal photography on Eyes Wide Shut began in November of 1996 and filming was not completed until June of 1998. Produced in complete secrecy and starring the most famous married movie star couple since Taylor and Burton, the picture was a magnet for insane speculation. As the production refused to comment on any of the rumors, a lot of them wound up being reported as fact. Reputable outlets said that stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were playing married psychiatrists who have sex with their patients. Less respected outlets claimed that the film would feature a menage a trois and Cruise wearing a dress. I kept seeing on one particularly ignominious website that co-star Harvey Keitel was fired for ejaculating on Kidman during a masturbation scene. (Whoever came up with that one had obviously just watched Bad Lieutenant. Anyway, according to his pal Gary Oldman, a fed-up Keitel walked off the set when Kubrick wasn’t satisfied with the 68th take of him stepping through a doorway.)
These days, movie releases are micromanaged to arrive pre-chewed, with the discourse already determined. But Eyes Wide Shut was tantalizingly mysterious and unknown, promising boundary-pushing adult content from Hollywood’s most whispered-about couple. I don’t know if anyone really knew what they expected to see when the lights went down, but I know they weren’t expecting what they got. Eyes Wide Shut confounded people. It puzzled and infuriated them. I can still recall the quiet grumbling in that auditorium with the ugly seam on the screen when the press screening was over. I had brought along as my guest a co-worker from my other job. He and I were grinning ear-to-ear when the lights came up. We both loved the film unequivocally – and were very much alone in that room.
“Halfway between hit and flop, Viennese sausage and chopped liver, ridiculously though intellectually overhyped for the very marginal entertainment, edification and titillation it provides over its somewhat turgid 159-minute running time,” wrote Andrew Sarris, in one of the more generous notices. As a second-stringer at Philadelphia Weekly, I didn’t get to review the movie, but the lead critic took a couple of shots at me in a year-end piece for including it on my ten best list. The conventional wisdom among the Entertainment Weekly set was that this was a doddering old man’s movie: hermetically sealed and out of touch, full of bizarre, un-erotic interludes, fake New York locations and a severe shortage of steamy chemistry between the leads. All these things, I found myself arguing alongside my co-worker that summer, were by design.
I was managing a movie theater back then, and we’d opened Eyes Wide Shut to an audience quite eager to express their dissatisfaction afterward. (It’s probably different now that everything is automated, but in those days people really enjoyed yelling at whoever sold them tickets to films they didn’t like.) From that vantage point, the movie’s marketing campaign started to feel like an elaborate prank by Kubrick: Get everyone revved up for a taboo-smashing porno movie and instead give them a pokerfaced comedy about a jealous milquetoast who can’t get laid at an orgy. Just the idea of his wife having unrequited sexual desires for someone else sends Cruise’s banal Dr. Bill crashing out on an all-night attempt at an erotic odyssey that turns into one humiliation after another. Then he gets home just in time to walk in on his wife cuckolding him in her dreams.
The thing about Eyes Wide Shut is that it’s funny as hell. Dr. Bill is an extremely dull man – most of his dialogue is repeating back whatever someone just said to him – and while everyone in the movie from supermodels to Alan Cumming are all throwing themselves at him, he can’t manage to close the deal with any of them. It’s hilariously counterintuitive casting for the hottest movie star in the world. In 1996, right before he started shooting Eyes Wide Shut, Cruise had launched the Mission: Impossible franchise and given the performance of his career in Jerry Maguire, for which he justly received the Oscar for Best Actor. (Just kidding. Geoffrey Rush actually won that year for Shine, a movie nobody has thought of since at least the turn of the century. I’m still angry about this.)
Cruise was at the height of his movie star powers, yet we’ve never seen him as diminished as he is in Eyes Wide Shut. He’s never looked so short or ill at ease, with Kubrick’s endless re-takes deliberately sanding all the natural charm off his line readings. Kidman towers over him not just physically, but also transforms from the familiar wife Dr. Bill takes for granted into an abruptly unattainable object of mystery. Her confession turns the whole world upside down for her husband – hence the movie’s languid torpor and uncanny locations that look almost, but not quite, like the New York City we know.
Despite what your conspiracy nut friends might tell you, the unnervingly stilted, opulent orgy sequence is not an expose of Epstein Island or Diddy parties. You can watch Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York if you want to see how boring and gross wealthy sex criminals really are. (I love the theory that Kubrick was murdered because Eyes Wide Shut exposed the secrets of the Illuminati. Sure, they killed him and then put the movie out on 2,500 screens.) All the robes, masked chanting and mechanical humping are as eerie as they are sort of silly: an externalization of the frightening, forbidden fantasies of a glad-handing stuffed shirt like Dr. Bill.
In a pattern that’s been going on with Kubrick films since before The Shining racked up a bunch of Razzie nominations, Eyes Wide Shut survived the first wave of critical dismissals and is now regarded by many as a classic. (I’m old enough to remember when Barry Lyndon was the one nobody liked. Lately it seems to have become the consensus favorite among young cinephiles.) It’s gratifying to see the movie’s reputation restored in a shiny new Criterion edition that removes the silly digital censorship U.S. audiences had to put up with, and the new disc does a fair job replicating the intense grain structure of those original 35mm prints. Eyes Wide Shut outlived the three years of tabloid rumors that tainted its reception, and the movie has even outlasted a lot of the venues that showed it. That theater where my co-worker and I so passionately once defended Eyes Wide Shut to angry customers is now a gymnastics school.
“Eyes Wide Shut” is out in a new 4K UHD edition from the Criterion Collection. It is also streaming on Tubi.
