Eyes Wide Shut
1999, UK/USA, Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Colour, Running Time: 153 minutes
DVD, Region 2, Warner, Video: 1.33:1, Audio: Dolby Digital 5.1
Dr William Harford (Tom Cruise) is a prestigious Manhattan practitioner, married to a beautiful woman (Nicole Kidman) with whom he has produced the perfect daughter - everything appears to be rosy. One evening the couple are smoking pot and enter into an unexpected argument, initiated by an evening before where both of them were the subjects of attempted seductions at the high class party of one of his patients (Sydney Pollack). Harford, living his life wearing rose-tinted spectacles, is dismayed to learn that his trusted wife would have been willing to be unfaithful to him had she had the chance several years previous. Receiving a timely call from a patient’s daughter he sets off alone to officially confirm a death. From that point on his perception of the world and his life has changed and there is sex everywhere and sexual intention where he once would have overlooked its latent possibility - for example, the daughter of his dead patient reveals that she’s in love with him before her fiancée walks in oblivious to her feelings for another man, just as Harford had been with his wife. Meeting an old acquaintance, Nick, in a jazz bar he is intrigued to find out about an event taking place at a secluded mansion and persuades Nick to tell him the password for entry. Obtaining a costume he gets into the place to find some sort of perverse mass ritual where masked people are mating with each other without regard for social conventions. But he has not managed to fool them with his anonymous presence…
Kubrick delivered the final cut of Eyes Wide Shut days before his death and it proved to be a controversial piece for a couple of reasons - firstly it contained an abundance of soft-core sex scenes and nudity (the likes of which tends not to go down too well with American audiences), and secondly some people were disappointed with it on a critical level. It was a pretty big budget film (around $65 m) but Kubrick is an auteur more than anything and it’s always risky giving that amount of cash to someone who is primarily concerned with making truly great works of cinematic art in today’s business. Based on a book by Arthur Schnitzler the film was once intended to be made by Kubrick back in the seventies and one can only wonder how different it would have been. As it is, he has created what I feel to be a near perfect slice of pure cinema - Cruise and Kidman perform quite brilliantly (though I find her character to be somewhat obnoxious) and the imagery is almost always striking. A dream- (or nightmare) like world is constructed around people that are in one way or another obsessed with sexual issues, and the film’s centrepiece (the mansion ritual/orgy sequence) is hypnotic and tense. It’s an intriguing story that can envelope the viewer like few films today. The extensive production itself, as had become commonplace for Kubrick movies, proved to be arduous for all.
Due to the sex scenes some of the shots were digitally obscured in post-production with cloaked figures generally - for the US cut. Thankfully, here in the UK, we get the Full Monty. Unfortunately Warner broke with politically correct weakness when a particularly prominent Eastern religious group present in the UK complained that parts of the soundtrack contained elements of divine music (Bhagavad-Gita) - they removed the ‘offending’ part of the soundtrack (though the film remains intact). It doesn’t have a great impact but I can never agree to that kind of rubbish - if someone is offended by something then they simply need not watch it. Anyway, other than that the Warner R2 DVD presents the film in roughly the correct aspect ratio of 1.33:1 (wrongly projected theatrically at 1.85:1) with beautiful image quality and an excellent 5.1 track (truly coming to life for the distinctive and potent score). There are some insightful interviews contained on the disc making up a nice package for a rare modern cinematic treat that we should be thankful ever got made, but avoid the US disc. There has since been a Blu-ray version Eyes Wide Shut but I understand it is once again cropped to 1.78:1 - extra resolution or not, this is not the way to see such a meticulously composed film, hence until they respect the director’s wishes I’ll hang on to this DVD forever.