Copyright © 1999 by Michael
Segers, All rights reserved
Earlier
this year, when director Stanley
Kubrick died, I listed his greatest films and asked that if anyone knew
anything about his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, the final cut of which he
completed the day before his death, to let the rest of us know. That was in
March, and now in July, I’m still rovin’ and ravin’ but no longer waitin’
for this final curious chapter of a great body of work. The film is in, the jury
is out, and I am feeling very old, because this film reminds me so much of a
film of a previous generation, Last Tango in Paris, which some two and a
half decades ago arrived with all the hype, pretensions, and bare behinds of
this current effort. We don’t seem to have come very far in the past quarter
century.
Based
on a little-known novel by Arthur Schnitzler (a play by whom was the basis for La
Ronde, Max Ophuls’s charming 1950 film), Eyes Wide Shut is the
story of a Manhattan couple, Dr. Bill Harford and his wife Alice (played by real
life marrieds, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman). They live in an apartment that
most New Yorkers would die for, a masterpiece of defined spaces, shadows, light,
paintings, textures, and, oh, yes, a Christmas tree. Although the time sequences
are confusing, the film progresses not so much through acts as through almost
symphonic movements, variations on themes, but Christmas trees and parties, of a
sort, are unifying images.
The
first movement is a Christmas party at a New York townhouse hosted by a patient
of "Dr. Bill’s," where the Harfords do not know the other guests.
Soon, the doctor is called to treat a nude woman who has just had sex with the
host and too many illegal drugs, while Alice drinks too much champagne and
suffers the tedious (to us, if not to her) flirtations of some generic,
geriatric middle-European lech.
The
second movement is an extended pot-smoking sequence that just does not sound
true for a couple of yuppies married nine years and living on Central Park West.
A couple of college sophomores, getting together in the dorm while a roommate is
away, perhaps, but not people with the sophistication and the track record that
these two have. Alice admits that the previous summer she had seen a man with
whom she had imagined—umm, breaking her marriage vows.
Not
since Jimmy Carter’s Playboy confession (talk about previous
generations) has lust in the heart stirred up so much hoopla. At this point,
summarizing fails. You wouldn’t believe it, anyway, as Bill (Cruise) sets out
to get even or get laid, but not on the level of fantasy. At least, you can’t
believe how boring naked bodies can be, unless you saw Ready to Wear.
The
long, motionless, sometimes emotionless monologues and dialogues are almost a
welcome break from a tedious, even silly, masked—what? Orgy, satanic mass,
costume party? Something involving a lot of feathers, ear-crunching music, and
supposedly some digital masking of the anatomical difference between an R-rating
and an NC-17 (which used to be an X). Frankly, my dears, although I kept my eyes
tightly open for every visually lush moment of this film, I didn’t see
anything amiss—or a-mister, as might be more likely.
There
is a strange kind of unreality about this film. At one point, the central
character (Cruise) says that it is just after midnight. A little later, he says
that it is just about four in the morning. Yet, as far as I can reconstruct the
events, there is no way that so much could have happened in four hours. And, for
what it is worth, this sometime Villager does not recognize the names of the
streets supposedly in Greenwich Village.
Kubrick
works almost against his text. As I see or read the film, I feel that the
repeated message, which is put so often into words, is that somehow
desire—pure, impure, sweaty, gut-twisting desire—even if for someone else,
is what keeps the mmm in monogamy. Ostensibly, the events of the this
film suggest you better not fret, you better not cry, you better not stray from
the straight and narrow, or you’ll die of AIDS, get killed by some monstrous
(but silly) swingers club, or possibly be sentenced to act in a Stanley Kubrick
flick.
Poor
Nicole Kidman. There can’t be any reason for her to drop her drawers as often
as she does, and certainly not to be caught sitting on the seat we all must sit
on. In another flashback to Last Tango, although a couple of characters
are expected to bare their souls, only the woman is expected to bare her butt as
well. After the film began, three women charged into the row I was sitting on
and occupied the seats to my right. I emphasize they didn’t come in with me:
they did come in with bags of burgers and fries in their purses. But, at one
point when A Character (I don’t want to give too much away) orders Harford/Cruise
to strip, my neighbor said, "Oh, boy, now it’s our turn." But,
still, Cruise emerged with a smile on his face… and nothing else emerged.
As
far as the infamous couplings between the famously married couple go, well, they
may sell a few tickets (the theater was more crowded than I’ve ever seen it;
of course, I haven’t yet seen the latest Star Wars installment). As a
service to consumers, let me tell you if you’ve seen the preview or commercial
with the "mirror-has-two-faces" bit, you’ve seen it all. There are a
few gentler moments, probably the only moments in the whole two and a half hours
of this film about real marriages, near the very beginning, when Alice and Bill
are running late for a party, fretting over telephone numbers, missing wallets,
a child’s bedtime. It is when Kidman is fully (but suggstively) clothed that
she is her sexiest.
Coincidentally,
during the week before I saw Eyes Wide Shut, I looked at a book of stills
of Marlene Dietrich
taken from her films. Some sixty years later, the lush, opulent, fetishistic
concoctions that she wore make her look sexier, even kinkier, than anything seen
in this film. And, she pulls it all off, but keeps it all on, with a G-rating.
There is something very provocative about mystery, and Kidman has left nothing
to our imaginations.
Keep
your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, and your browser pointed right
here for a column by a very special guest that I’ve wanted to share with you
since this series began.