Eyes Wide Shut (Film Review)

1999 Warner Bros.
Directed by: Stanley Kubrick; Written by: Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael
Starring: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, and Marie Richardson
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 159 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 5.5/10

Dr. Bill Harford and his wife, Alice, attend an upper crust party, where they are quickly separated. Two models attempt to take Bill "where the rainbow ends," while an aging lothario attempts to seduce Alice. Alice, though very drunk, is able to eventually ask her dance-floor seducer to leave. Bill is only spared from infidelity when the party's host, Bill's patient, Victor Ziegler, calls Bill to an upper room, where a beautiful young woman Victor had been cavorting with has had an overdose. Bill is able to save the woman, but his absence is brought to his attention later by Alice, who wants to know if Bill slept with the two models. What follows is an inebriated argument, where Bill confesses he thinks men are driven to have sex with as many women as possible, while women only want security. Alice then admits she once had a sexual fantasy about another man when she and Bill were on a long ago vacation. Somehow this is more than Bill can bare, and he uses an opportunity to check on the family of a deceased patient as a cover to go out on a night of sexual discovery. Through this night, willing sexual partners fall into Bill's lap, then fall right out before he can consummate. Eventually, Bill ends up at a masked orgy in a palatial mansion, where it appears the crowd is made up of New York's most influential and dangerous figures...and it's only so long before they discover that family doctor, Bill Harford, does not belong.
Stanley Kubrick made few simple films, but I often land in the sparse minority of viewers who feel the perceived complexity only billows from Kubrick's visual perfectionism, masking a lack of thematic and philosophical depth. 10,000 academic papers say otherwise, I understand, but this is a feeling I can't shake, and one 1999's labyrinthine Eyes Wide Shut does little to remedy. Still, I find some things to like in this sprawling, overlong film. 

Tom Cruise, as Bill, puts in one of the stronger, certainly most emotional performances of his career. As Alice, the generally great Nicole Kidman isn't quite as up to Cruise's level here, yet she is still an engaging, and under Kubrick's lens, luminary presence. Jocelyn Pook's atmospheric, string-based score gives the air of a chamber mystery, much like her stunning work in the long-form documentary, The Staircase, which also focuses on a marriage and to a much higher degree, a murder. Like Eyes Wide Shut, The Staircase also finds little resolution in its darker proceedings, though I must admit I found those nearly 13 hours more engaging than Eyes Wide Shut's nearly three.
Eyes Wide Shut contains additional elements I personally admire, from a surprisingly strong view of marriage from the generally bleak Kubrick, who in his final work seems to find the domestic a far greater place in which to reside than debauchery, to the kind of strong aesthetic construction one expects from a Kubrick film. While the stiff dialogue can be frustrating, and the film sometimes drags like a ritzy orgy's sack of cocaine, I come out just liking Eyes Wide Shut a bit more than I dislike it. It's a dichotomous film not only in its structure, which is bisected by the famous (though not at all sexy) orgy scene, but in the ways it succeeds and fails. Nearly every bad element features a positive counterpoint that just barely outweighs it. That's Kubrick for me.