Running time: 159 minutes
Starring: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sidney Pollack
Rating 8 out of 10
Contrary to all the teaser publicity surrounding Stanley Kubrick's cinematic swansong, this is not the second coming; nor is it the most wildly explicit extravaganza of eroticism you'll have ever seen.However, as an intelligent, adult study of sexual jealousy and the psychology of male and female carnal desires, this is a movie every bit as intriguing, thought-provoking, stylish and, just occasionally, unsettling as one would have expected from its iconoclastic director.
It is also, alas, the best part of an hour too long, but then brevity neverwas one of Kubrick's stronger points.
First and foremost, this is the movie where Tom Cruise finally comes into his own as a serious dramatic actor - and that's in the face of stiff competition, none more so than when playing opposite his on-and-off-screen wife Kidman, who effortlessly steals their few but pertinent scenes from beneath his feet. Forget their gruesome double act in Far and Away; here, they are totally credible as outwardly loving New York couple Dr William Harford and his wife Alice, whom we first meet as they prepare to attend a black-tie Christmas party where Harford gets his host and richest patient Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) out of a sticky situation upstairs with a naked girl in a drug coma.
Back home, Harford and Alice - the worse the wear for drink and drugs - get into a heated discussion; one thing leads to another, and Alice confesses to her involvement the previous summer with a naval officer to whom she was deeply attracted. Stunned, hurt and frustrated, Harford stumbles out into the night, to visit the grieving daughter of a just-deceased patient. To his surprise, the daughter throws herself at him, which proves just the start of his bizarre, twilight odyssey, who's presented with a succession of increasingly obliging women, as if to encourage him to commit some kind of sexual revenge on his wife's shock confession.
From here on, Eyes Wide Shut enters wilder and weirder realms of sometimes surreal fantasy, as an increasingly horny Harford smuggles his way into a private, country-house masked orgy - the scene of several thrusting sexual shenanigans denied to the film's American audiences. In this genuinely disturbing Gothic arena, Harford is drawn into a dangerous game of seemingly demonic proportions - and Kubrick's movie starts going off the rails. What was once a witty and apposite study of modern-day moralities turns into a rather clumsy murder mystery, and the shifts in tone from portentous thriller to semi-slapstick comedy jar. Still, no-one expected such an ambitious and unyielding project - a modern-day interpretation (by screenwriter Frederic Raphael) of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle - to be plain and easy sailing, and Kubrick's genius is that, while you might have certain misgivings, you'll never be bored.
