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It was inevitable that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut would be the most
misunderstood film of 1999. Kubrick died four months prior to its release, and
there was no end to speculation how much he would have tinkered with the
picture, changed it, "fixed" it. We'll never know. But even without the haunting
enigma of the director's death--and its eerie echo/anticipation in the scene
when Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) visits the deathbed of one of his patients--
Eyes Wide Shut would have perplexed and polarized viewers and reviewers.
After all, virtually every movie of Kubrick's post-U.S. career had; only 1964's
Dr. Strangelove opened to something approaching consensus. Quite apart
from the author's tinkering, Kubrick's movies themselves always seemed to
change--partly because they changed us, changed the world and the ways
we experienced and understood it. And we may expect Eyes Wide Shut to
do the same. Unlike Kubrick himself, it has time.
So consider, as we settle in to live with this long, advisedly slow,
mesmerizing film, how challenging and ambiguous its narrative strategy is.
The source is an Arthur Schnitzler novella titled Traumnovelle (or "Dream
Story"), and it's a moot question how much of Eyes Wide Shut itself is
dream, from the blue shadows frosting the Harfords' bedroom to the
backstage replica of New York's Greenwich Village that Kubrick built in
England. Its major movement is an imaginative night-journey (even the
daylight parts of it) taken by a man reeling from his wife's teasing confession
of fantasized infidelity, and toward the end there is a token gesture of the
couple waking to reality and, perhaps, a new, chastened maturity. Yet on
some level--visually, psychologically, logically--every scene shimmers
with unreality. Is everything in the movie a dream? And if so, who is
dreaming it at any given moment, and why?
Don't settle for easy answers. Kubrick's ultimate odyssey beckons. And now
the dream is yours
