Eyes Wide Shut

Kubrick’s final film is a droll, furtive dream of sex and infidelity, probably the weirdest film in Tom Cruise’s filmography. Loosely based on Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, it’s a film about a Manhattan doctor whose complacent beliefs about his marriage to Alice (Nicole Kidman) are shaken when she admits to having fantasized about another man. It’s a peculiar film which continues to inspire polarized opinion and close interpretation, yet it exerts a strong fascination.

Staff Pick: Nate

Kubrick’s great achievement in the film is to find and hold an odd, unsettling, sometimes erotic tone for the doctor’s strange encounters. Shooting in a grainy high-contrast style, using lots of back-lighting, underlighting and strong primary colors, setting the film at Christmas to take advantage of the holiday lights, he makes it all a little garish, like an urban sideshow. Dr. Bill is not really the protagonist but the acted-upon, careening from one situation to another, out of his depth. Kubrick pays special attention to each individual scene. He makes a deliberate choice, I think, not to roll them together into an ongoing story, but to make each one a destination—to give each encounter the intensity of a dream in which this moment is clear but it’s hard to remember where we’ve come from or guess what comes next.

Roger Ebert

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