Though its initial reception was skewed by all the hype surrounding
the death of the Master, and by the film's misleading marketing
as all-out all-star erotica, Kubrick's last film is indeed a very
good one, assured and mysterious. Kubrick's adaptation of Arthur
Schnitzler's Traumnovelle centers on the tangled sexual
fantasies and nightmares of a gilded dream-couple perfectly embodied
by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in a contemporary dream-Manhattan.
The film's investment in the dream setting can't be overstated,
illuminating both the off-kilter details of Kubrick's NYC and
the fantastic accumulation of bizarrery Cruise's Dr. William Harford
(a name screenwriter Frederic Raphael identifies as a contraction
of Harrison-Ford, Kubrick's model for the rich powerful waspy
doctor) encounters on a long strange night and next day, from
happy hookers to bloodless baroque orgies to the recriminations
of the upper-crust powers-that-be-kinky. The degree of reality
we are meant to assign to this concatenation of sex-charged but
unconsummated incidents is hinted at by the fact that Kidman's
character is named Alice, as in Lewis Carroll. The scenes with
Cruise and Kidman together are the film's best; though Kidman
steals many of them, with her most memorable film performance,
Cruise's overall portrayal of a charmed-life master-of-the-universe
whose marital, sexual, and societal complacences are stripped
away layer by layer is almost as noteworthy. Though sexual jealousy
seems a less philosophically stirring theme than those of Kubrick's
best films, Eyes Wide Shut is just as compelling as those
from moment to moment, largely because of the striking visuals--not
too many movies are worth seeing for the ways rooms are lighted
and frames are composed, but this is one.