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Stanley Kubrick: Eyes Wide Shut
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In the 1990s, Kubrick began a film that would cause much distress on Kubrick. He was on the move to make a science fiction film called Artificial Intelligence (AI). But the film created many problems. The progress of the film was very slow, and the technological effects were not up to Kubrick’s standards. While pre-production work on AI crawled along, Kubrick combined Rhapsody and Blue Moon and officially announced his next project as Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring the then-married Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. After two years of production under strict security and privacy, the film was released.
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Next up was Kubrick's longtime fascination with Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Novel, a film he'd been developing since the early '70s. Kubrick sent a fax to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and immediately got the power couple on board as his stars. Even in the "communications" age, Stanley Kubrick had the capacity to keep Eyes Wide Shut shrouded in secrecy. Prior to its July 16, 1999 release only select factoids were confirmed. The adaptation brings Schnitzler's story into contemporary times and transplants the European locale to New York (built on a London soundstage and backlot). The scenario is an erotic thriller and tantalizing trailers show an unadorned Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in compromising positions.
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Kubrick had started pre-production on Full Metal Jacket (1987) in 1980, a full seven years before it was theatrically released. The success of similar films during that time (particularly Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986) and John Irvin's Hamburger Hill (1987)) left him a bit jaded, feeling like he had been beaten at his own game. This sentiment stayed with him in the early 1990s when he decided to shelf "The Aryan Papers", his adaptation of the Louis Begley novel "Wartime Lies". At the time Steven Spielberg was shooting the soon-to-become classic Schindler's List (1993), and Kubrick thought the Holocaust-based subject matter of the two projects was too similar. The shelving of this project explains the 12-year span between "Full Metal Jacket" and Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
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Fitting that Kubrick ends his career with a dream. Eyes Wide Shut (1999) completes a circle of sorts. As Killer’s Kiss took place in the New York City of reality, Eyes Wide Shut takes place in a false one. Kubrick recreated whole streets and stores and props, down to the graffiti on a Village Voice mailbox. Here the hermetic quality of his later films reaches a state of brimming. Kubrick has recreated his birth home far from the actual one, and the sense of an artist making his dreams real is unprecedented.
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Kubrick was always a keen listener to BBC Radio, Tony explains. When he first arrived in the UK, back in the early 1960s, he happened to hear this drama serial, Shadow On The Sun. Three decades later, in the early 1990s, after he had finished Full Metal Jacket, he was looking for a new project, so he asked Tony to track down the scripts. He spent a few years, on and off, thinking about Shadow On The Sun, reading and annotating the scripts, before he abandoned the idea and eventually - after working on and rejecting AI (which was filmed by Steven Spielberg after Kubrick's death) - made Eyes Wide Shut instead.
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Certainly a strange film, Eyes Wide Shut, like all of Kubrick's pictures, is impeccably photographed and quite beautiful to look at thanks to some interesting camera angles and plenty of colorful lighting. From the opening scene in which Kidman surprisingly and abruptly disrobes to the orchestrated physicality of the bourgeoisie orgy in the mansion, it's obvious that Kubrick's need to control his filmmaking is in high gear. It's unfortunate then that the character of Bill Harford is so smug. His affluence and condescending tone make him difficult to relate to or to have sympathy for, and the film's idea that we should believe he's never had thoughts to equal those of his wife is hard to swallow - he's a wealthy, handsome doctor surrounded by female patients in one of the most well-to-do neighborhoods in the country. Cruise plays the part with his usual smug persona, which doesn't help matters much, though that said, maybe that's the point. Kidman's character is a little more sympathetic in that at least she's honest and open with her husband about the issues they have to deal with.
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