DVD Review: 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Cameron Birnie uncovers some dusty classics and hidden gems from the local video store.

"Immensely boring", "monumentally unimaginative", "a regrettable failure", "a disaster", and "most pretentious of all, a shaggy God story".

These are a handful of the verdicts confidently handed down by critics when Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968.

It seemed as though Kubrick, who had spent three painstaking years perfecting what is now widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, could have ushered in Christ's return to Earth on a flaming chariot and still he would have been shrugged off as a technically-proficient bore.

History repeats itself. In 1999, after another three-year odyssey, only a few days after finishing putting the final touches on what he considered to be his finest work yet, the notorious perfectionist fell dead.

The world was left with one last Stanley Kubrick film, his first in over a decade. And when Eyes Wide Shut was finally unveiled, a majority of critics responded in much the same way they had initially responded to 2001 - like dogs that had been shown a card trick.

The most common complaints - "not sexy enough", "no psychological depth", "unlikeable protagonists" - were the most incongruous. Had these self-proclaimed cinephiles never seen a Kubrick film before?

The most recognizably human character in 2001 was HAL, the murderous computer, the most erotic scenes Kubrick ever set to celluloid were probably the rape scenes in A Clockwork Orange, or perhaps Jack Nicholson's brief tryst with a demonic hag in The Shining, and his subjects have always been much larger than the mere personal struggles of individual characters.

So what is the subject of Eyes Wide Shut? On the surface (and this is a film that constantly reminds us to be wary of surfaces) it is about the sexual misadventures of Bill Harford (Tom Cruise), a wealthy, attractive private doctor and card-carrying member of the Manhattan elite (one of the film's quietly underplayed running gags is the way that Bill presents his medical license to every new person he meets, like a military officer pulling rank).

Dr Bill's complacent existence is thrown into a state of disarray when his bored, stoned, beautiful wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) decides to let him in on a little secret - she has always harbored an overwhelming desire for another man.

As his house of cards crumbles around him, Bill sets off into the night, wandering the streets of the city that never sleeps and hoping to settle his tortured ego by seeking out some sexual transgressions of his own.

He finds transgression everywhere he looks. The New York City of Eyes Wide Shut is a millennial Babylon where almost every human interaction involves a financial transaction, a sexual transaction, or both.

Bill visits a prostitute, haggles with an aggressive costume salesman who offers to throw in his daughter for a reasonable price, and, finally, sneaks into a ritualistic, masked orgy in a country mansion that would make the Marquis de Sade blush.

But like a tourist in a civil war zone, the good doctor is way out of his depth. The orgy scene, a spectacular set piece quite unlike anything I have seen in any other film, is a metaphor for the obscene amorality of the ruling class (the film's real subject), and by entering, Bill makes the ultimate faux pas - he transgresses an invisible class barrier and tries to play games with the real American elites, the sinister, powerful captains of politics and industry who instantly recognize him as the charlatan that he is. He is exposed, with potentially deadly consequences...

If this all sounds a little difficult to swallow, it's worth pointing out that the film is based on ‘Dream Story', a short story by Arthur Schnitzler, and quite intentionally has the logic and structure of a nightmare.

There are many reasons to believe that the events portrayed in the film are actually taking place in Bill's fevered imagination - the series of seemingly interchangeable red headed beauties that he encounters (stand-ins for his wife), the way his sexual encounters are always frustrated by fate at the moment of truth and the way that they mirror Alice's own terrible dream of betrayal, which she relays in cruel detail to Bill.

In some ways Eyes Wide Shut resembles a David Lynch film, except that Kubrick is a much more careful, deliberate director. There is not a single image, angle, sound or line of dialogue in the film that isn't loaded with significance.

Its eerie tone and clinical attention to detail will not appeal to every viewer, but for the dedicated, its pleasures are many and great. It is a film that rewards repeated viewings (I enjoyed it even more the sixth time I watched it than I did the fifth).

It is a credit to Stanley Kubrick that he made a career out of confounding critics, and in a way it is almost reassuring to think of him rolling in his grave, agonizing one last time over their inability to understand him.