Eyes Wide Shut

Kubrick's final project is a moralistic cautionary tale, a treatise on the dangers of marital infidelity that comes across like an elegant variation on Reefer Madness, or like After Hours played portentously straight. Much of it is preposterous, even silly, and yet the overall effect is hypnotic; it's meant to invoke a dream state, to feel half-remembered even as it's unspooling in front of us. The sense of dislocation (enhanced by a graininess unheard of in a big-budget studio picture like this) is deliberate, and complaints about Kubrick's eerily abandoned soundstage recreation of New York City are badly misguided. Equally obtuse are those who cavil about the film's notable lack of eroticism--it's a nightmare, people, it's not supposed to turn you on. Both Cruise and Kidman do impressive work, but the main attraction, now as ever, is Kubrick's formal mastery, his ability to transport us to a peculiar, distressingly beautiful world of his own devising; it's a testament to the man's virtuosity that no matter how impatient I became with his almost self-parodic solemnity and his prudish worldview, there was always a part of me that hoped his movie--not to say his career, his life--would never end. Recommended. (M. D'Angelo)