Eyes Wide Shut
Dir. Stanley Kubrick
1999

Eyes Wide Shut, a widely misrepresented movie, is about a prude herb narcissist turning into a corncob at the idea that his wife might possibly have her own life and desires, who then becomes so fixated on it that even after witnessing CSA and the Fidelio party he still just keeps replaying an imagined tryst. Kubrick’s swan song is an extremely funny movie that keenly observes the violence of men and the degree to which conservative mores are just wholly removed from reality.

A quick synopsis for those who haven’t seen it – Bill Hartford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) flirt with friends of friends at a colleague’s holiday party. Bill gets in a fight with Alice over her dreaming of cheating on him on vacation some years back, and he walks out into the night. There, he embarks on a psychosexual journey into not getting laid and getting freaked out by a lot of people who are less repressed in their sexual desires than he. Things come to a head when he comes into contact with a secret society named Fidelio, and he realizes he might not be able to go back home safely again after his walk through the night.

Because the film is about the direction of sexual provocation at Bill and Alice Harford, you don’t actually get a ton of insight into real sexual desire, and certainly very little genuine eroticism (though the way Alice carries herself, Bill with Alan Cumming as the hotel clerk, and the encounter between Bill and Sally, these have some release to them.) Rather, it’s more of a collection of how these value systems interact with the bombardment of desire. Alice seems pretty healthy about how she enjoys attention and quickly recognizes Bill’s dehumanization. Bill certainly compartmentalizes a lot, and that can be healthy, but he’s also totally obsessed with himself and his own presentation to the point that he doesn’t even entertain what other people want anymore.

The most erotic figure in the film, though, is probably the self-secure dynamism of Sydney Pollack. It’s your choice whether or not to believe his story in his big scene, but the fact is the way he talks about and treats women makes him pretty horrific either way. But that evil isn’t repellant or odious – it’s ingratiating, welcoming, maybe intoxicating. Compared to the harsh lighting of the film’s street scenes (infamously taking place on a studio recreation of New York streets, Larry Smith’s cinematography captures neon signs with all the threat of Taxi Driver), the Pollack scenes are shot with the comforting light and color of the glitziest 90s prestige drama – he’s shot with enough distance to look like a friend, shot from high enough that he doesn’t go full John Huston.

Without much doubt for me, this is right up there with Barry Lyndon for the best Kubrick. Nothing else really comes close. Cruise the corncob, Kidman the familiar housewife. She’s funny, she’s sexy, she’s made a little insane by her inattentive husband, and it’s hard not to take her side even when she’s twisting his words. Or maybe it’s just hard to take the side of Cuck Supreme even before he fails to get laid for ~72 hours.