Eyes Wide Shut - Tom Cruise as Dr. William 'Bill' Harford

Description:

A doctor (Tom Cruise) becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter after his wife (Nicole Kidman) admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met and chastising him for dishonesty in not admitting to his own fantasies. This sets him off into unfulfilled encounters with a dead patient's daughter and a hooker. But when he visits a nightclub, where a pianist friend Nick Nightingale (Todd Field) is playing, he learns about a secret sexual group and decides to attend one of their congregations. However, he quickly learns he is in well over his head and finds he and his family are threatened.

Tagline:

• Cruise. Kidman. Kubrick.

Pictures:

Movie Overview:

Fan Review:

1999 was one of the greatest years in recent memory for film. Yet Eyes Wide Shut is all but absent from the end-of-the-year awards ceremonies and most critics lists.

The first thing to bear in mind are that this film was hyped way beyond necessity. As if the general public had any interest in the "Kubrick" listed below "Cruise" and "Kidman". To them this was just another Big Actor's next Big Movie. Passing it off like a "real Hollywood couple gets busy on the big screen" heightened expectations for something Kubrick wasn't trying to achieve. It suffered the same audience reaction as The Phantom Menace, and made only a fraction of the money.

Critics seemed to be lining up to take potshots at this film. Why? Recent history shows us that all of Kubrick's films from 2001 onward have been attacked critically, and subsequently hailed as classic years later. The same is true of most of Orson Welles' work. Few critics took the time to see this movie more than once before spewing their venom. A filmmaker like Kubrick is not going for direct emotional contact with the audience. He is aiming far deeper, asking the viewer to reflect on not only the images, but the themes, and the emotional investments of the characters. The subtlety is not something common in today's films, and something critics apparently can't process quick enough to meet a press deadline.

For all those complain that the film isn't sexy or erotic enough are missing the point completely. It's not about sex. It's about many other things, some of which linger in the background, some that aren't noticeable on the initial viewing. Kubrick raises questions about our institution of marriage, the nature of faith, commitment, temptation. That most in the audience weren't willing to meet Kubrick, Cruise, and Kidman halfway in this meditation isn't a comment on the quality on the filmmaking, it's a shortcoming of the sensory-deadened society. If Kubrick had been more in touch with today's film culture, would he have bothered to give us this complex of an experience? Let's thank him for his seclusion.

Interpretations:

The film's puzzling narrative has inspired several interpretations, many of which see the film as a psychological allegory rather than as a straightforward drama.

Eyes Wide Shut is a fairly faithful adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (or Dream Story), but it leaves out one important piece of information that might have served as the key to understanding it. In Schnitzler's novella, Fridolin, the Bill Harford equivalent, is told by his wife that she first began to fantasize about infidelity while they were on holiday in Denmark. When Fridolin goes on his strange journey and arrives at the masked ball, the password is "Denmark". This could very well indicate that Fridolin's journey is a dream and is not meant to be interpreted literally, but Schnitzler leaves such a conclusion unresolved.

In Eyes Wide Shut, the password is changed to "Fidelio", a word that hints at the theme of marital fidelty, but does not indicate clearly that Bill's journey is a dream. ("Fidelio" is also the name of Beethoven's only opera which, appropriately, has matrimonial fidelity as its subject matter. See A Clockwork Orange for more allusions to Beethoven by Kubrick.) Reading the journey as a dream helps to justify the story's more bizarre events, in particular the fact that every woman Bill meets falls in love with him; it enables us to interpret the journey as a dream of wish-fulfillment sparked by Bill's jealousy of Alice's fantasies. However, Kubrick seems to have preferred to leave this interpretation ambiguous rather than concrete; in addition, if Bill is dreaming, the script makes it unclear where and when the dream begins and ends. Furthermore, Kubrick introduced Alice's dream, in which she too appears to have gone on an even more strange and allegorical journey, one that makes Bill's journey seem relatively realistic.

Kubrick's downplaying of the dreamlike nature of Bill's journey made the film more open to interpretation, but also meant that more literal-minded viewers did not recognize its story as an allegory, finding it merely silly and implausible.

Jungian Interpretation:

Kubrick's films often deal with the subconscious and the impulses of the Id, as well as sometimes featuring what he referred to as archetypes (a well-known example being the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey). When the savage impulses of "the Shadow" (from the psychological theories of Carl Jung), are not integrated with the conscious life, madness results. Kubrick said that he was interested profoundly in the Shadow (the archetype of the savage) and how it emerges despite civilization. In Eyes Wide Shut, Alice describes her fantasy affair to Bill after the couple have been to a party where Bill had treated a prostitute for an overdose. Bill's old friend Nick (Todd Field) tells him about a sexual underworld where men of absolute power have an absolute access to women, and Bill decides to explore this world. He moves into the circle of the Shadow, and he sees the ruthless, remorseless, and violent nature of power as sex and sex as power. He views the naked masculinity of the subconscious through a mask. He returns to his wife, confessing all (although he was never adulterous). At the end of the movie, she seems to forgive him and says that the two must immediately go home and "fuck". In a sense, the couple have integrated their psyches. They have both seen and experienced their Shadows and decided to go on.

Dream Logic:

"Why does the world of the film seem so unreal in virtually every scene" asks Mario Falsetto in his "Stanley Kubrick: A narrative and stylistic analysis", commenting on "Eyes Wide Shut". His conclusion is that this is the consequence of the intermingling of dream with reality chosen by Kubrick as the privileged mode of narration. In fact, "Eyes Wide Shut" is run by an oneric logic which continuously contaminates the reality of the episodes in such a way as to make the spectator pass from a daily, plausible and familiar world (Bill and Alice at home, Bill with his patients, Alice with their daughter), to a nocturnal, unlikely and uncanny one. It is from the beginning, when Bill and Alice leave their elegant Upper East Side apartment to go to Victor Ziegler's party, that Kubrick makes us shift from one dimension to the other. Ziegler's luxurious palace, with its stunning decorations of light and where an orchestra plays dance motifs from the forties, resembles an enchanted casle (dream palace), where for Alice it is possible to meet an improbable Hungarian playboy and Bill two seductive models who wants to bring him "at the end of the rainbow". The choice of setting the story during the Christmas period, as well as the striking colour palette used, with it's sumptuous colours (red, purple, blue, red, gold), together with the episodes and the characters of the film, contribute to endow it with a magic, fairy-tale atmosphere. All the movie is a synthesis of unlikelihood which openly mocks the mimetic convention of realism, and renders useless (as with dreams) any attempt to assess definitely it's iridescent polysemy.

Stylistic Features:

Kubrick adopted several stylistic conventions in Eyes Wide Shut. As with Barry Lyndon, much of the lighting in "Eyes Wide Shut" comes from the 'pratical' lights (the lights that can be seen in the shot and are meant to be the source of light within the fiction of the story). Kubrick's style can best be described as 'simulated natural lighting' because it looks closer to the way lighting looks in real life as opposed to movies, but is still artificial. For example, the scene with the man in the red cloak and gold mask is lit by a 'pratical' spotlight from high above that one could describe as existing within the fiction of the movie, but the darker shadow areas were lit to some extent by a diffuse fill light that is not motivated by any source within the scene, perhaps a 'china ball' or helium ballon fixture off screen. Kubrick occasionally departs from this naturalistic strategy into overt, unrealistic expressionism such as the intensly saturated blue light that flood the bathroom of the Harfords when they are arguing or the same blue light coming in through the windows of Ziegler's billard room. The film negative was 'pushed' in processing to increase the speed of the film, thus allowing for the use of natural lighting. "Eyes Wide Shut" made extensive use of Christmas lights (the story is set in the Christmas season). The colours red, blue, yellow and green feature predominantly in the film. This is enhanced by the use of Christmas decorations. It is often suggested that the colour scheme is an important symbolic schemata. This theory has weight, considering the four 'modern art' posters in the hospital hallway which individually consist of these colours (suggesting a consonance of location and symbolic meaning) and Kubrick's reputation as a master of detail. More simply it may suggest the primal or basic nature of the thematic content. Shop-fronts and street signs also express a quasi-semiotic meaning in that they convey information to an observant audience that the characters are unaware of. For example, before Bill enters the prostitute's apartment building, they stop at a store with the sign 'The Lotto Shop', perhaps indicating that he is gambling with his health.

With A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut is the most theatrical of Kubrick's works. This theatricality is expressed on two different and complementary levels, aesthetic and symbolic, which together compose what Michel Ciment calls "A trompe l'oeil universe", where what seems real is fake, and where everything is ambivalent, deceitful. Dr. Bill Harford's shift from the well-established world of his certainties to an unfamiliar world hidden behind (inside) the well-established one, is a shift from what seems real (and which Bill takes for granted) to what in fact is different, if not the opposite of what it seemed. The "reality" in which Bill believes, the one he lives in, is true as a backdrop. Against his will he will discover that Ziegler has a double life (on the evening of the party at his mansion he betrays his wife, by his own admission he was among the masked guests gathered at Somerton), that Nick Nightingale, his old pal from college, who now plays in a jazz band, also plays the piano at the mysterious night gatherings at which Ziegler participates.

Like Militch, the disreputable owner of the costume shop "Rainbow" (who rents costumes and acts as pimp for his own daughter), these characters are something and at the meantime something else, they play an official role that hides a covert one, (like the two Japanese business men with make up and wigs who amuse themselves with Militch's daughter), equal in this to the masked guests attending an ominous ceremony ("I'm not gonna tell you their names, but if I did, I don't think you'd sleep so well", Ziegler tells Bill, implying the prestige and power they have in their day life). But even Marion Nathanson, the daughter of Bill's dead patient, who unexpectedly reveals her feelings for him (she is engaged to a maths professor), shows a sudden duplicity similar to that of Alice.

"Domino", the nickname of the prostitute Bill meets, is not arbitrary, for it suggests both dominance, sexual subjugation, and the carnival costume (which by itself evokes conspiracy and mystery and is weared by all the partecipants to the ceremony), and is also in relation to another name, Beethoven's "Fidelio" (the password that allows Bill to get inside Somerton) which can be either a reference to conjugal fidelity or, once more, to dressing-up (in the homonymous opera, Leonore disguises herself as a male prison guard in order to save her beloved husband Florestan). Thanks to a password which is in itself a mark of ambiguity, dressed-up as a member of a secret confraternity, Dr. Bill Harford will gain access to the gloomiest circle of his progressive descent into darkness. Somerton Manor is where theatrics reaches its visual apex, a place in which everything is carefully staged ("It was a kind of charade", Ziegler will say later) and where also Bill, his face covered by a mask, participates to the general game of concealment.

Like "A Clockwork Orange", "Eyes Wide Shut" is a movie that strongly insists on the staged, counterfeit nature of identities together (consequently) with its emphasis on the blurring of the line between truth and fiction. This atmosphere is also strongly emphasized by the studio reconstruction of Lower Manhattan, extremely accurate as usual with Kubrick in all its details, but at the same time unequivocally fake. A city suspended like all the rest between dream and reality, expressionism and realism, that would have pleased Cornell Woolrich and Fritz Lang. An actual but magically anachronistic place (as Johnatan Rosenbaum has noticed, the "Sonata Cafe", the club where Nightingale plays, brings us back to the 50ies), full of ironic cross-references (the "Verona" restaurant, the Viennese cafe where Bill stops reading a newspaper, Militch's "Rainbow" shop, etc.). This modern and bygone New York is just another facade of which, for Kubrick, in his last film, the world is entirely made of.

Narrative structure:

The story follows a dramatic structure of leaving the familiar world, entering situations that are in some way an otherworld, and returning to the familiar world. In the third part of the movie, Bill revisits the scenes of the adventures he had the night before. This is reminiscent of the structure Kubrick used in A Clockwork Orange, in which the character Alex revisits each of the locations at which he performed violent acts in the first part of that movie. Each location of Dr. Bill's unactualized sexuality is stripped of sexual mystique.

Critical response:

Critics objected chiefly to two features of the film. First, the movie's pacing is slow. While this may have been intended to convey the nature of dreaming, critics objected that it simply made actions and decisions laborious. Second, reviewers commented on the fact that Kubrick had shot his New York City scenes in a studio and that New York didn't "look like New York."

Lee Siegel, writing in Harper's, felt that most critics responded mainly to the marketing campaign and were unable to address the film on its own terms.

American censorship controversy:

Citing contractual obligations to deliver an R-rating, Warner Brothers digitally altered the orgy scene for the American release of Eyes Wide Shut, blocking out images of explicit sexuality. This alteration of Kubrick's vision antagonized many cinephiles, as they argued that Kubrick had never been shy about ratings: A Clockwork Orange had an X-rating. Kubrick was the one who made the censorship before he died.

A scene with a young Leelee Sobieski in underwear is sometimes removed.

The British Board of Film Classification allowed Eyes Wide Shut to be released to British cinemas without the need for the digital alterations seen in US cinemas. The film was rated 18, viewable only by those aged 18 and over.

Originally rated NC-17 meaning 18 and older in the USA.

Music:

• The film's title music is "Waltz 2" from Shostakovich's Suite for Variety Stage Orchestra, for years misidentified as the composer's Jazz Suite 2, recorded and released under the latter, incorrect, name by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The headline of the newspaper which Bill Harford buys at the Newstand reads "Happy to be Alive" - a phrase which corresponds fundamentally with Shostakovich's life; so the choice of music is perhaps a reference to the parallels in Shostakovich's biography.
• In the scene with the strange ritual, the incantations heard in the background are actually Christian prayers sung in Romanian, played in reverse.
• One of the recurring pieces of music in the film is the eerie second movement of György Ligeti's piano cycle "Musica Ricercata". The piece is unusual in that it uses only three notes (plus octave displacements), in addition to the unyielding performance indication of Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale. The choice of Ligeti is interesting because Kubrick used Ligeti's Atmospheres in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey without obtaining Ligeti's consent, much to the composer's dismay. The piece was intended by Ligeti as a portrait of Stalin and his terror - possibly another connection to Shostakovich's waltz.
• In the morgue scene, Franz Liszt's late solo piano piece, "Nuages Gris" ("Somber Clouds") (1881), heightens the morbidity.
  
  Trivia:
• Christiane Kubrick, Stanley's wife, had an uncredited guest role as a woman sitting behind Dr. Harford at Café Sonata.
• Kubrick considered casting Steve Martin in the role of Dr William Hartford, eventually given to Tom Cruise.
• During the long shooting schedule, actors Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh dropped out, and were replaced by Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson, respectively.
• Woody Allen claimed that Kubrick had considered him for the role of Victor Ziegler, but says that Kubrick "came to his senses".
• Director Stanley Kubrick died just four days after presenting Warner Bros. with what was reported to be a final cut of the film.

Credits:

Directed by
Stanley Kubrick

Writing credits
Arthur Schnitzler (novel Traumnovelle)

Stanley Kubrick (screenplay) and
Frederic Raphael (screenplay)

Cast (in credits order) verified as complete
Tom Cruise .... Dr. William 'Bill' Harford
Nicole Kidman .... Alice Harford
Madison Eginton .... Helena Harford
Jackie Sawiris .... Roz
Sydney Pollack .... Victor Ziegler
Leslie Lowe .... Illona Ziegler
Peter Benson .... Bandleader
Todd Field .... Nick Nightingale
Michael Doven .... Ziegler's Secretary
Sky Dumont .... Sandor Szavost
Louise J. Taylor .... Gayle (as Louise Taylor)
Stewart Thorndike .... Nuala
Randall Paul .... Harris
Julienne Davis .... Amanda 'Mandy' Curran
Lisa Leone .... Lisa
Kevin Connealy .... Lou Nathanson
Marie Richardson .... Marion Nathanson
Thomas Gibson .... Carl Thomas
Mariana Hewett .... Rosa
Dan Rollman .... Rowdy College Kid
Gavin Perry .... Rowdy College Kid
Chris Pare .... Rowdy College Kid
Adam Lias .... Rowdy College Kid
Christian Clarke .... Rowdy College Kid
Kyle Whitcombe .... Rowdy College Kid
Gary Goba .... Naval Officer
Vinessa Shaw .... Domino
Florian Windorfer .... Café Sonata Maître D'
Rade Serbedzija .... Mr. Milich (as Rade Sherbedgia)
Togo Igawa .... Japanese Man #1
Eiji Kusuhara .... Japanese Man #2
Leelee Sobieski .... Milich's Daughter
Sam Douglas .... Cab Driver
Angus MacInnes .... Gateman #1
Abigail Good .... Masked Party Principal/Mysterious Woman
Brian W. Cook .... Tall Butler
Leon Vitali .... Red Cloak
Carmela Marner .... Waitress at Gillespie's
Alan Cumming .... Hotel Desk Clerk
Fay Masterson .... Sally
Phil Davies .... Stalker
Cindy Dolenc .... Waitress at Sharky's
Clark Hayes .... Hospital Receptionist
Treva Etienne .... Morgue Orderly