The Class of 1999: 'Eyes Wide Shut'
Stanley Kubrick's final film is an often misunderstood masterpiece.
1999 was a historically-great year for film and dramatic narrative as a whole. I’m using my 2024 to look back at, reconsider, and celebrate these stories as they all celebrate their 25th anniversaries. I recently re-reviewed Mystery Men; next up on the docket is The Iron Giant. But first… it’s time for…
Eyes Wide Shut - directed by Stanley Kubrick - written by Stanley Kubrick & Frederic Raphael - July 16, 1999
Eyes Wide Shut opened amidst a surprising amount of hype for what is ostensibly an art film about a troubled marriage.
For one thing, it was the final film from Stanley Kubrick; the GOAT died in March of that same year, less than a week after completing EWS, at the age of 70. And there was a sense that Kubrick had really thrown his back into this one, even by his own famously exacting standards. He’d been trying to adapt the German writer Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 work of fiction, Traumnovelle (Dream Novella), since sometime after completing 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. And while Kubrick was always known for being the kind of director who does hundreds of takes, once he finally nailed down a script he was happy with and started film, he really took his time getting it right: production on Eyes Wide Shut lasted longer than 15 months, earning it a spot in Guinness for the longest uninterrupted film shoot (to give you some sense of how bananas that is, Oppenheimer was filmed in 57 days). It went on for so long, in fact, that two of its most famous cast members, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Harvey Keitel, had to be cut out of the movie after they’d already filmed most or all of their respective parts, because they either weren’t available for re-shoots or they couldn’t hang around to keep filming (there were also rumblings that Keitel didn’t jive well with Kubrick’s tendency to do so many takes). So the movie was already adding to Kubrick’s myth before it came out.
For another thing, Eyes Wide Shut starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who were, at the time, one of the most famous power couples in Hollywood.
And finally, Warner Bros. sold Eyes Wide Shut as not just a movie about sex (which it partially is), but as a sexy movie (which it mostly is not). There were all these crazy rumors about explicit sex scenes and an orgy sequence that was so racy and boundary-pushing it was either going to give audience members a heart attack, an orgasm, or some combination thereof.
So by the time Eyes Wide Shut hit theaters, people thought they were getting a porno flick starring two mainstream megastars.
And Eyes Wide Shut ain’t that.
Eyes Wide Shut centers around Bill Harford (Cruise), a successful Manhattan doctor who is happily married to the beautiful Alice (Kidman), with whom he shares a daughter, Helena (Madison Eginton). The story begins with Bill and Alice preparing to attend a fancy-schmancy Christmas party.
“How do I look?” Alice asks Bill from atop the toilet - a telling moment of casual intimacy that also marks the first of the film’s many many, many uses of dialogue that could have multiple meanings. When Bill tells Alice that she looks “perfect,” she scolds him for “not even looking,” all but turning to camera to announce one of the film’s primary themes.
The couple soon arrives at the party, which is hosted by one of Bill’s wealthiest patients, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack, himself a director of classic films like Three Days of the Condor and Tootsie, in the role Keitel was supposed to play). While dancing, Bill recognizes an old friend, Nick Nightingale (Todd Field, who went on to direct such destined-to-be-considered-classic-films-someday as as Little Children and Tár); Nick went to med school with Bill but dropped out, and is now a jazz pianist performing with the band at the party.
Alice goes to freshen up her drink while Bill and Nick play catch-up; in the process, she meets an older Hungarian man, Sandor Szavost (Sky du Mont), who very blatantly tries, and fails, to seduce her (he also spends a lot of time talking about Ovid, the Roman poet who was exiled, many believe, for the crime of adultery). Likewise, Bill meets, and begins flirting with, a pair of models who all but explicitly offer him a threesome (one of those models, by the way, is Stuart Thorndike, who, like Field, has gone to become an accomplished filmmaker in her own right).
Before anything gets out of hand, Ziegler summons Bill to an upstairs bathroom, where a beautiful, naked young woman with whom Ziegler is having an affair has overdosed on an 8 ball of heroin and coke. Bill helps to revive the woman, whose name turns out to be Mandy (Julienne Davis), and promises Ziegler he won’t tell anyone about the incident, lest his wife find out.
The following night, Bill and Alice share a joint and talk about their separate experiences at the party. They get into a fight, motivated largely by jealousy, during which during which Alice reveals that she once considered cheating on Bill with a handsome naval officer, even if it meant throwing away their entire marriage (this scene, by the way, offers the single best performance Kidman has ever given).
Before Bill can respond to this revelation, he’s called to the home of a patient who has just died in his sleep. There, he offers his condolences to the patient’s daughter, Marion (Marie Richardson, playing the part originally slated for Jennifer Jason Leigh); Marion, in turn, confesses her love for Bill, despite being engaged to another man, Carl, who also happens to be a doctor (played by Thomas Gibson, a.k.a. Greg from Dharma and Greg). Bill rejects her advances and leaves, but he doesn’t go directly home; he can’t stop obsessing over Alice and that goddamn naval officer.
While walking around Manhattan, trapped in his nightmarish fantasies of Alice’s unrealized affair, Bill is propositioned by a sex worker, Domino (Vinessa Shaw, who members of my generation may remember as the object of the hero’s desire in Ladybugs). Domino invites Bill to her apartment using a less-than-subtle double-entendre: “Would you like to come inside?” Bill says he would, and seems ready to go to bed with her when Alice calls, asking when he’ll be home. He tells her not to wait up, but then decides he isn’t going to sleep with Domino regardless. He pays her for her time anyway and leaves.
He soon winds up at a jazz club in the Village where Nick is performing. As the two catch up over drinks, Nick gets a call regarding a job opportunity. He’s so secretive about the gig in question that he piques Bill’s interest, and ultimately reveals that he performs at orgies for the wealthy and powerful; the participants are so wealthy and powerful, in fact, that Nick has to perform with a blindfold on, and all attendees must wear masks.
Bill coaxes both the location of that evening’s orgy and the password for entrance out of Nick.
(That password, not-incidentally, is “Fidelio,” which is the title of a Beethoven opera in which a woman utilizes a disguise to rescue her husband from prison - events that are mirrored in various ways throughout Eyes Wide Shut, not least of which is that, very literally, a masked woman later saves Bill from a de facto prison.)
Bill now needs to find a cloak and mask so he can fit in at this big orgy. He wakes up a costume shop owner, Milich (Rade Šerbedžija), who conveniently lives above his store and then bribes him into renting Bill the necessary wardrobe, even though it’s the middle of the night. During this process, Milich also becomes aware that a pair of adult men are hiding in the back of the store with his adolescent daughter (Leelee Sobieski), clearly engaged in sexual congress. Before Bill leaves, Milich locks the men in his office and announces his intentions to call the police.
Bill somehow persuades a taxi to drive him out to this mansion in Long Island, where he’s able to infiltrate the orgy. After observing some sort of bizarre ritual, he wanders around the house observing, but not actually participating in, the orgy. He meets a mysterious masked woman, who may very well be Mandy (although she’s not played by Julienne Davis, who reportedly declined to be in the scene; the voice is provided by an uncredited Cate Blanchett, and while the physical role is credited to Abigail Goode, Michel Chion notes that even a cursory glance at the character’s nude body makes it clear a different actress takes over partway through the scene). She warns Bill that he doesn’t belong there and needs to get out before he’s discovered, but it’s too late: Bill is pulled before some kind of high council (the leader of whom is played by Leon Vitali, who played the vengeful stepson in Barry Lyndon, and was Kubrick’s assistant of many years).
Pressed for a second password he cannot provide, Bill appears to be on the verge of severe punishment. But the mystery woman steps forward and volunteers to take Bill’s lumps for him; thus, Bill is safely dismissed from the orgy.
Bill arrives back home, where he finds Alice laughing in her sleep. After waking her up, she hugs him tight and begins to weep as she explains that she was having a dream in which she was having sex with both the naval officer and a cadre of other men, laughing at the thought of cuckolding Bill.
The next day, Bill reads in the newspaper that Mandy has died from an overdose (in a rare error on the part of Kubrick, who was an expatriate, the article says “drugs overdose,” as it would be printed in the UK, and not “drug overdose,” as it would be printed in the U.S.). Bill cancels the rest of his appointments for the day and tells Alice that he has to go out on business again that night.
In fact, he spends all that free time retracing his steps from the previous evening, and finds that everything is somehow even more nightmarish than it was before. Returning to the costume shop, he learns that Milich ultimately struck up some kind of deal to prostitute his daughter to the men, and implies that he’s willing to work out a similar agreement for Bill (Bill does not partake). Outside of the mansion where the orgy took place, a man gives him a note warning him to stay away, and at one point, it appears as if he’s being followed.
Visiting the jazz club where Nick was playing, meanwhile, he finds that the pianist’s residency has been ended early; at Nick’s hotel, a clerk, played most excellently by Alan Cumming, tells him that some big guys dragged Nick out in the middle of the night (this very funny scene is brimming with sexual innuendos, including a store sign, visible through the window, that is partially obscured in such a way so as to read “ass”; it’s fairly clear that Cumming’s character is flirting with Bill).
Meanwhile, at Domino’s apartment, Bill meets her roommate, Sally (Fay Masterson), and seems ready to sleep with her - until she announces that Domino found out she’s HIV positive earlier that day. He also goes to see Mandy’s corpse, presumably to try and figure out if she was the woman from the night before (in other words, there’s a chance she may have ultimately died to save him).
Bill is finally summoned to see Ziegler, who reveals that he was at the orgy the night before. He tells Bill that there was no second password; it was a ruse to prove that Bill was crashing the party. Ziegler tells Bill that the secret society which staged the orgy wants only his silence… but he also confirms that Mandy was the woman at the party… but he also also denies that the secret society killed her. Ziegler also claims that Nick is back home, safe and sound.
Unsure what to think, Bill returns home, where he finds the mask from his costume resting on his pillow. In tears, he confesses everything to her.
In the morning, Bill and Alice, still in the heat of their discussion, take their daughter to FAO Schwartz, where Alice forgives Bill for his transgression: “I think we should both be grateful that we have come unharmed out of all our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream.” When Bill asks her if she’s sure, she replies, “Only as sure I am that the reality of one night, let alone a lifetime, is not the whole truth.”
“And no dream is every just a dream,” Bill adds.
“The important thing is, we’re awake now, and hopefully for a long time to come,” Alice says.
“Forever,” Bill promises.
But Alice contradicts him: “Forever? Let’s not use that word. It frightens me.” Then, she quickly adds, “But I do love you. And you know, there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible.”
“What’s that?” Bill asks.
And Alice answers: “Fuck.”
Eyes Wide Shut, like all Kubrick films, is impossibly dense, and summing up its many strengths in just a few words is futile (to say nothing of the fact that there are things in the movie that are clearly important but which I cannot begin to explain, like its multiple allusions to Venice, Italy and its surreptitious references to the 1993 Long Island Railroad Shooting).
Having said that, if you put a gun to my head and told me to explain the meaning of Eyes Wide Shut in a single sentence, that sentence would be “Sex is better with love, and reality is preferable to fantasy.”
For all the complaints about how unsexy a lot of the movie is, it seems as though a whole lotta people failed to note that one character is consistently sexy: Alice. Alice is sexy when she’s getting dressed; Alice is sexy when she’s getting undressed; Alice is sexy when she and Bill fuck; Alice is sexy when Bill imagines her fucking someone else (those fantasies, in fact, are more impassioned than any of the “real” sex in the movie).
And the reason Alice is sexy all the time while a parade of other beautiful naked people are not is because Bill is in love with her.
Oh, do all the sex scenes not involving Alice feel cold and mechanical? Duh: they’re supposed to! Bill has every opportunity to have just about any kind of sex he wants - throughout his odyssey, he’s offered women, men, one-on-one sex, group sex, and sex with adolescent girl - but none of them appeal to him enough to pull the trigger… because none of them are Alice, the only woman he loves and, therefore, truly desires.
That’s why everyone at the orgy wears a mask: the participants want to emphasize anonymous sex, intercourse without any real connection. This can simply never be as powerful or gratifying and sex with a partner you’ve actually, y’know, met and spoken with and gotten to know.
This facet of the film also speaks to another misunderstanding a lot of critics have: that Bill’s world is rocked by the extremely dated realization that women, Alice included, like sex as much as men. But that’s not the part of the admission that guts Bill and sends him on his dark journey: what truly disturbs him is Alice’s assertion that she was willing to sacrifice their marriage just to get laid by some random hot guy, even if just once.
Bill is a square. He may enjoy flirting with models at a party, but he has no real inclination to sleep with other women besides Alice - and he certainly wouldn’t throw his marriage away to do so. He ostensibly spends Eyes Wide Shut trying to build up the nerve to fuck someone else, but he isn’t able to perform, and, again, didn’t really want to anyway.
The disparity between desire and reality is demonstrated in myriad ways throughout the movie. These include the casting of Cruise and Kidman as an average couple that has to do all the banal stuff all couples have to do, like write thank you cards; Bill’s profession as a doctor, where, as we both see hear firsthand and hear him discuss with Alice, part of his job is to examine beautiful naked weapon in a definitively sterile setting; the presence of multiple pairs of doppelgängers (e.g., Bill and Carl, Domino and Sally, the multiple Mandys, etc.); setting the story during Christmas, when anticipation is palpable in the air, thus increasing the chances of severe disappointment; the coitus interruptus of the narrative structure; the use of a waltz by Dmitri Shostakovich, who the critic Lee Siegel notes was “a guileful composer famous for writing music whose subtle motifs seemed to celebrate Stalin but actually undermined him;” and as a class issue, largely via the character of Ziegler.
Bill and Alice are wowed by Ziegler’s wealth, who is also one of the masterminds behind the orgy Bill goes to such great lengths to attend. But for all of his money, Ziegler doesn’t have the kind of love shared by Bill and Alice. He cheats on his wife, whose one line in the film, about how he flirts with all the women at their party, indicates that she doesn’t like him very much while reinforcing the notion that he is inauthentic. Yeah, he has all the anonymous, lurid, drug-fueled sex he can handle… but that sex simply can never be as passionate as the sex enjoyed by people who feel a sincere connection to one another.
Appropriately, the film’s ending is an acknowledgement of truth that denies the audience their fantasy. Alice clearly still desires Bill, and it seems as though the couple are going to be okay in the immediate future… but she also won’t commit to the idea that they’ve now “forever” solved all the problems in their marriage. Kubrick and his widow, Christiane, were wed for 41 years before he died - but he also had two failed marriages prior to that. He understood that we can’t know if Bill and Alice and will be alright or not, and he deplored sentimentality anyway. So he does not give the viewer the pat conclusion they expect from a Tom Cruise vehicle.
That - and the absence of the softcore porn people thought they were getting - help explain the initial divisive reaction to Eyes Wide Shut. But that was pretty standard for Kubrick films, art is a long game, and the maestro always got the last laugh. As no less an authority than Martin Scorsese put it in Michel Ciment's Kubrick: The Definitive Edition:
"When Eyes Wide Shut came out a few months after Stanley Kubrick's death in 1999, it was severely misunderstood, which came as no surprise. If you go back and look at the contemporary reactions to any Kubrick picture (except the earliest ones), you'll see that all his films were initially misunderstood. Then, after five or ten years came the realization that 2001 or Barry Lyndon or The Shining was like nothing else before or since."
I’d certainly agree that reality is better than fantasy if said reality includes the likes of Nicole Kidman in her prime.