And himself, and their relationship, and the world but mostly, it's about an individual man being terrified by the inscrutability of the female sexual drive. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) perceives his wife. Regardless of how much of it is in dreams, it's obvious that it all takes place inside the main character's head: at heart, as suggested by the very first image - a blunt, objectifying shot of Nicole Kidman dropping her dress to reveal her naked backside - this is the story of how Dr. At any rate, I think it's quite certain that some of the action takes place inside its protagonist's dreams, though I won't pretend that I can pick the exact scene where the dream starts or where it stops. The very title of Traumnovelle - that is, Dream Story - tips its hand that there's more than a little possibility that some of what we're reading takes place in the characters' heads, and while Eyes Wide Shut is significantly more cryptic, it unpacks to mean about the same thing: being absolutely certain you're awake ( Eyes Wide) when you're not ( Shut). Kubrick and Frederic Raphael's screenplay is surprisingly faithful, considering the shift from 1920s Vienna (not incidentally, the home of Freud and symbolic psychoanalysis) to 1990s New York, and from a pair of not-quite-explicitly Jews to the most vanilla gentiles you could conceive of (to hammer the point home, Kubrick - an ethnically Jewish filmmaker, lest we forget - set his film at Christmas and included decorations and trees lit with multicolor bulbs in so many shots that it very quickly lunges into self-parody). It even manages to make the hoariest, most laughable cliché in all of dramatic fiction - "it was all a dream!" - work in such a way that the possibility of its most confounding elements being explained away thus actually manages to make the film denser and more challenging, not simpler and gimmicky.Īdmittedly, it comes by the dream subtext by virtue of its source material, the 1926 novella Traumnovelle by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. As it stands, it one of the most tightly self-contained and complex in its themes it's positively brazen in how it plays by a cinematography rulebook that no other movie I've ever seen has apparently even heard of, let alone copied from. In its current, unmistakably compromised state, it's still among my favorite of all the director's career: it's a little spooky to imagine what it might be like if Kubrick had had the time to make it even better. That being said, it's one of the greatest unfinished movies in the history of cinema. We might deeply wish that not to be the case, but it is. I do not know what changes Kubrick would have made, had he lived but I really don't think this movie is exactly the movie he'd have signed off on. There are incidental shots that feel redundant, scenes that plainly go on too long, and the film's momentum is extravagantly strange in its final hour. The sound mix, for one, has some fucking dodgy moments, and the music (culled from Kubrick's notes, for he had not finalised the soundtrack yet) at times cuts in and out crudely. It might very well be 98% of the movie Kubrick would have signed off on if he'd lived on for years and years but that 2% niggles. So let's just call it like it is: Eyes Wide Shut is an unfinished movie. And of course, the director who had re-cut The Shining after it had opened - twice - could hardly be counted on to have a real picture-locked cut months out from the release date. As though Kubrick's films had slap-dash sound mixes that didn't do much besides make sure you could hear the dialogue. Well, the final cut except for the sound mix, a tossed-off admission that was framed in the entertainment media as just an incidental detail, oh the sound mix, well nobody needs to worry about that. to all of us nervous cinephiles hoping for one last masterpiece from one of the least prolific auteurs of the last quarter of the 20th Century. He'd been working for some time on a new movie, and just days before his passing, he had screened a cut of it to some executives and the lead actors. When Stanley Kubrick died on 7 March, 1999, it was some twelve years since the release of his last film, Full Metal Jacket but all was not lost.
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