Nothing is accidental – on Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999)
The direction is sublime. Nothing on-screen is accidental. It's about sex, but not sexy. Sex as violence, exploitation and ownership – sex to be wielded as a weapon to put others down, not as something that can elevate us to a point of ecstasy or self-actualisation.
The sole sexual encounter in this film that could be described in those latter rosy terms is an imagined one – merely the promise of satisfying, erotic sex. And its conjuring then takes on a life of its own, precipitating events that plumb the depths of human depravity, callousness, entitlement and cruelty. And some pretty bad sex.
The affair may have been imagined, but that doesn't make it in any way "not real." No dream is ever just a dream.
Cruise's performance is not "vacant" or "wooden" – despite Kubrick's secrecy and refusal to let him watch the dailies to find a throughline for his character, Cruise incredibly stays in the pocket as a man who occupies the narrow space in between:
a handsome, successful doctor who feels entitled to a place among the masters of the universe
and
a handsome, successful yet cuckolded doctor who brandishes his doctor's license like a police badge (not his weapon so much as a shield)
… he keeps this up for something like 150 mins. Incredible.
Kidman is astonishingly good in the first half of this film, and her performance is (probably) objectively better than Cruise's. The only reason I am more taken with Cruise's work is that I think he had a higher mountain to climb. Maybe the credit belongs to Kubrick for casting him, but what is captured on-screen is the work of an actor’s career.
I only watched it for the first time last night (and I was ready to ridicule it (!), such is its reputation in The Culture™ as an infamous punchline) but already I consider it probably the best directorial swan song, ever. Bar none. There may be better films that happened to be directors' final works, but no other film is as perfectly suited to be remembered as the final directorial work as Eyes Wide Shut. The complexity and richness of the central marital relationship could only have been conceived and directed by a director with a lifetime's worth of experience.
5/5 stars.