Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

In a Nutshell: A doctor infiltrates a sex cult after a marital secret comes to light.

Eyes Wide Shut, a disorienting look into dehumanized marriage, is a worthy bookend to Stanley Kubrick’s peerless and polarizing filmography. It is also Kubrick’s most adult picture, exploring the lies of happy marriages and the sexual nightmares that occur beyond closed doors. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (married at the time) star as Bill and Alice Hartford, a wealthy New York couple living an ideal marriage. Bill is a respected doctor attracting plenty of unwanted attention, but finds security in Alice’s fidelity. However, the night after a Christmas party, where both find themselves deflecting advances from guests (Alice’s in particular being the most transparent of seducers) Alice reveals that she nearly left Bill for a navel officer many years ago. Shaken, Bill decides to wander New York after attending a house call. He ends up meeting with an old friend, who leads him to an orgy where Bill’s involvement may have lead to the death of a party guest.

That handsome and multimillion dollar movie stars Cruise and Kidman were asked to play the central couple already places Bill and Alice’s marriage in a higher plane than our own, allowing our objective view into their (soon to be ruined) utopia. Bill is unassuming to his wife’s secrets, that end up puncturing a world he once thought he had control over. And indeed, the city of New York becomes a parade of characters that try to edge Bill towards their own sexual agendas. The orgy Bill attends is by far the coldest and most artificial expression of sex throughout the film, as masked guests passionlessly and noiselessly embrace together in isolation. Therein lies the dichotomy of Bill’s two options; impersonal sex with the women he meets, or his wife, fully realized before him, but now no more than another fixture in his upscale NY life.

This movie delves into many themes on the nature of men and women, marriage, even conspiracy. But what makes the film so memorable is not Kubrick’s exploration, but in his presentation of his beautifully unreal world. Eyes Wide Shut’s New York is a studio set sapping any of the charm accompanying an on-location shoot. The interior locations (the orgy, the Christmas party, the Hartford’s apartment) convey an European-like demeanor, stately but detached of warmth. Cruise gives a passive, restrained performance (unlike Kidman, a sensational window into the female cognition) that both enforces his disconnect with the world around him, but allows him to act as the audience’s surrogate through his strange adventure. In ideas alone, Eyes Wide Shut is not the most revolutionary in examining the collapse of marriage, but gives a thrillingly cinematic portal into Kubrick’s mechanized view of love. The final scene provides the glimmer of hope that Bill and Alice will improve their marriage. It is slight, but maybe it proves that Kubrick was not so cynical about human progression after all.