Eyes Wide Shut Re-Examined
Revisiting Kubrick's Swan Song With Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise
Kubrick's untimely death, a controversial studio digital edit and unfounded public expectations damaged the reputation of one of the director's greatest masterpieces.
Of all of Stanley Kubrick’s post Lolita (1962) films, Eyes Wide Shut (1999) arguably stands as the least universally appreciated. Even Barry Lyndon, though not very well known, is generally held in high regard by industry pundits (see Looking Back at Barry Lyndon). Some have argued that in his old age, and after a twelve-year hiatus, Stanley had simply lost his touch. Others have overplayed the fact that he died four days after turning over his final cut and have suggested that given Kubrick’s history of editing his films even after opening day, Eyes Wide Shut may have looked significantly different had Kubrick lived to see it released. However, to understand why the film has met with lukewarm reception, one needs to understand the circumstances under which it was unleashed upon the world.
Pre-release Speculation
Opening twelve years since Kubrick’s previous film, anticipation for Eyes Wide Shut was understandably rabid. Kubrick’s notorious secrecy fed the flames of speculation. People knew it had sexual content and that it starred the day's hottest couple: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Months before release, riding the wave of public expectation, Warner Brothers unleashed an ad campaign claiming that Eyes Wide Shut would be “the sexiest movie ever made.”
As anyone who has ever seen a Kubrick movie knows, sexy it was not. The sex was detached, mechanical, and almost inhuman. The implications were cynical, the pacing was slow, the drama subdued. It was the very opposite of the soft-core flick the tabloid generation had been told to expect. People were disappointed, and box office receipts suffered.
Critical Reception
Meanwhile, many critics were dumbfounded by Kubrick’s layered narrative and slow pacing, and like many of Kubrick's greatest, Eyes Wide Shut was originally met with somehwat negative reviews. To make matters worse, many of those critics who did recognize the brilliance of the work, often chose to nitpick about a maligned digital edit made after the director’s death, in order to gain it an R rating. The infamous “black blobs” inserted by Warner Brothers to block out sexual material during the film’s much talked about orgy scene, indeed sacrifice the carefully constructed composition of the shots they invade, but those were few in number, and the overall impact to the film is minimal. However, the ordeal served to further confirm the film’s negative historical footnote.
Eyes Wide Shut (a film that Scorsese called the fourth best of the nineties) is one of Kubrick’s true masterpieces, a subtle, powerful, and visually stunning exploration of the place that sex holds in marriage. It is arguably his most carefully edited movie, his most mature and most representative of the Kubrick touch. Over the years since its release, it has slowly started to gain a reputation as such; an unsurprising turn, considering that it took decades for both 2001 and The Shining to become recognized as the classics that they are.
