Eyes Wide Shut is a strange work of art, a 1999 film by legendary director Stanley Kubrick, based on a novella written in 1926 by Arthur Schnitzler. It stars Tom Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman who famously put on hold their careers to be part of the world-record breaking production time that kept them working for 400 days just to have a chance to collaborate with the renowned filmmaker. Kubrick finished the film and presented it to the studio, then, six days later passed away.
Met with critical acclaim, and receiving positive reviews, Eyes Wide Shut remains – now twenty years later – an intriguing, if not unique movie experience. Modern audiences, weaned on quick edits and fast-action (curiously enough, many from the same male lead) will surely be tested by Kubrick’s purposefully mild momentum, this an intense character study that revels in the time it takes to allow for long moments of study to become absorbed into the seemingly random plotting.
Cruise is Dr. Bill Harford, living in New York City with his beautiful wife Alice (Kidman) and their young daughter Helena. He is modestly successful with a thriving practice, recently welcomed into the city’s elite with an invitation to an extravagant Christmas party hosted by Bill’s wealthy patient, Victor Ziegler (played by fellow director Sydney Pollack). Once inside the party, the couple become separated, she ending up dancing with a particularly sauve and lascivious older man looking to seduce her while Bill holds company with a pair of attractive models, who seem to be inviting him to a some sexual nirvana.
However, as Bill tenuously deflects, he is interrupted by Ziegler, who has him sent to his suite, where a young nude woman is overdosing on drugs. Meanwhile, Alice holds at bay the would-be lover, but clearly relishes the sexual attention she is garnering. Eventually, Bill and Alice reunite on the dancefloor, where both admit they have seen the other during the evening in the lustful shade of pursuers, but again become distracted when Bill notices the piano player is a former friend and med-student who dropped out of school. He is Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), happy to see Bill again.
The next night, Bill and Alice share a joint while in bed, talking about the night before and as is must, the talk turns to sex, she wondering if the temptation of the young models would have lured him to betrayal and he asking the same of the debonair dancer. As tiny blades cut into the conversation, Bill makes a curious admission, confessing he is not jealous of Alice since he believes women are, by their very nature, bound to a kind of loyalty to their mates. This prompts Alice to shed some light and tells him of an encounter the couple had on a vacation in Cape Cod where a handsome Naval Officer she saw there become so alluring to her, she considered leaving Bill and their daughter.
Needless to say, this greatly puts Bill in a state of imbalance, yet before they can explore it further, once again, he is interrupted by a family member of a patient who has just died. He tells Alice he must go, then dresses and heads out into the night, soon falling into a bizarre sexualized odyssey that lasts the entire night.
A lot happens to Bill, but as such, let’s skip the finer details of a few significant meetings with people that play a larger part in the good doctor’s curious adventure and concentrate on one that ends up being the most peculiar and ultimately, the most damning. Naturally, spoilers ahead.
Bill finds himself on the streets, stunted again by an unfulfilled chance for sex, coming upon a jazz club that features Nick Nightingale. He enters just as the pianist finishes his set, the two meeting and sitting down to catch up. Nick explains that he actually lives on the west coast but is here for the money, describing one such gig that has him receiving a call just an hour before he’s meant to play, always at a new, secret location, where he tickles the ivories wearing a blindfold, forbidden to see his audience. He confesses though that one time, the blindfold slipped just loose enough that he became witness to extraordinary sights of masked people having sex with beautiful women in a rampant sort of ritualistic orgy. In Bill’s state of mind, one now ardently consumed with images of a fantasy where Alice is bedding a rugged Naval officer, he becomes intensely curious of Nick’s description and wants in, if only for revenge on the fantasy in his head. Nick says it’s an exclusive gathering, where an ever-changing password gets you in. However, when a call comes and a password is delivered, Nick passes it on to Bill, and the doctor makes a fateful choice to crash the party.
After renting a tux with a cape, hood, and a mask (and another increasingly odd sexual scenario), Bill arrives at the location and infiltrates the mansion, where he finds dozens of people in black robes and ornate masks watching a ceremony in the main hall as a figure dressed in red using smoke and staff, has a ring of women around him, each disrobing and then seemingly sent off to select their lovers. While it seems everyone in anonymous, Bill somehow standouts out, enough where a masked man in a balcony above takes notice. Meanwhile, in the background is a blindfolded Nick, playing to the crowd.
One of the women, a nude, leggy blond with a feather capped mask, escorts Bill out of the room, telling him he is in great danger and should leave. When they become separated, Bill explores the cavernous rooms of the home, finding every corner full of people in various states of sexual congress, bodies writhing about as other watch. He however, does not engage, and is soon escorted back to the man hall where he thinks the taxi driver is waiting, only to discover that he’s been found out and the man in red is waiting, a circle of followers around him and a darkness closing in as demands the doctor remove his mask make this moment in Eyes Wide Shut absolutely harrowing.
Kubrick is toying with some interpretation of course, as he often did, putting Bill on a strange journey of, as mentioned, unfulfillment, he surrounded by temptation but constantly distracted and removed from it, the weight of his wife’s confession pushing him into a kind of temporary abyss. This moment at the mansion is the very pit of that descent, where Bill must face all around him the sexual dissatisfaction he is living with and consequences of his action and in-action. While you might be here looking for answers to this grand puzzle of movie, I’d rather not speculate on my own thoughts, better to let you shape your image of Bill’s development.
Instead, let’s just briefly focus on the moment itself. When watching, look how Kubrick travels us through this estate, following Bill as if where on his shoulder (demon or angel is left up to us to decide), watching as he nervously enters a sacred gathering of people proud of their status but demanding anonymity, hiding behind cloaks and masks. Bill takes position in a circle of others watching as the man in red ceremoniously waves an incense-filled thurible in purposeful passes, stomping his staff in calculated taps that signal the women into action (and foreshadow a smaller moment later in a billiard room). It’s mesmerizing and rife with religious symbolism and a kind of sacrificial lamentation. That’s made all the more impactful by composer Jocelyn Pook‘s haunting score, one that absolutely suffocates this moment with disquieting unease and a mounting sense of dread.
Eyes Wide Shut is a test of patience in many respects, forcing viewers to pay a great deal of attention and draw conclusions that sometimes make connections to things far separated within the story. It, as so many of Kubrick’s stories are, is designed for questions, leaving a circuitous trail of hints and clues about that come only after perhaps a second look. Cruise and Kidman are very, very good (she is a marvel) and the movie itself is a like a weird amusement ride of oddities and wonder. Not for everyone, it’s a maddening bit of fun with a great moment at its center where a man is thoroughly, in all senses of the word, unmasked.