When Tom Cruise was cast as Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic in the 1989 biographical drama film Born on the Fourth of July, Cruise said that the role marked his first serious test as an actor, and he delivered an Oscar-worthy performance. The next most serious test came a decade later, when he starred alongside then-wife Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 erotic mystery psychological drama film Eyes Wide Shut, in which he plays Dr. Bill Harford, a seemingly happily married and successful New York doctor who, after being driven to jealousy by his wife, Kidman’s Alice, embarks on an extended nighttime odyssey of confusion and sexual exploration that turns into a nightmare.
Cruise’s casting in Eyes Wide Shut was a stroke of genius by Kubrick, whose notoriously methodical directorial approach required Cruise and Kidman to be present for over 15 months of filming. Eyes Wide Shut completely subverts Cruise’s heroic screen persona and sex appeal by continually placing Bill in increasingly bizarre sexual situations, all of which end in frustration. While the real-life marital intimacy that Cruise and Kidman brought to the film was one of the main selling points for Eyes Wide Shut, the film was most criticized at the time of its release for a perceived lack of sexual chemistry between them. Like the film as a whole, the scenes between Cruise and Kidman are most fascinating and telling in retrospect, especially in the context of their 2001 divorce.
When Eyes Wide Shut was released theatrically in 1999, approximately four months after Kubrick’s death, audiences and critics responded with a mixture of confusion and muted praise. Nearly 25 years later, Eyes Wide Shut is widely considered to be Kubrick’s last masterpiece, while Cruise’s performance is viewed as being one of the best of his career. Indeed, as the reception for Eyes Wide Shut has steadily improved over time, one can almost feel the presence of Kubrick playfully teasing the solutions to the film’s various underlying mysteries, which are more elusive and tantalizing than ever.
An Endless Night’s Journey Into Fantasy and Fear
Eyes Wide Shut is fundamentally a psychological thriller whose surrealist erotic fantasy elements remain firmly rooted in reality. What begins as a study of a stalled marriage, between Tom Cruise’s Bill and Nicole Kidman’s Alice, turns into an intense examination of sexual jealousy through a series of interlocking events that conspire to make Bill question his sanity. While each of these events seems entirely plausible and relatable on its own, they collectively form a diabolical construction through which Bill and the audience see evidence of conspiracy and murder.
As the film opens, Bill and Alice attend a Christmas party at the lavish residence of one of Bill’s patients, Victor Ziegler, played by Sydney Pollack. At the party, Alice is approached by a handsome older Hungarian man who attempts to seduce her, while Bill flirts with two models, until he’s called away to help Victor deal with a young woman who overdosed after having sex with him. Bill also has a chance reunion with Nick Nightingale, a pianist who attended medical school with Bill.
Related
Eyes Wide Shut: Behind the Scenes of Kubrick’s Erotic Christmas Thriller
A reevaluation of Stanley Kubrick’s final film, focusing on how it subverted expectations and created a cult classic in the process.
The triggering scene in Eyes Wide Shut happens the following night in Bill and Alice’s bedroom, where Alice confesses her fantasy of a handsome naval officer whom she saw the previous year when Bill and Alice were on vacation. Ignited by jealousy and haunted by persistent imagined visions of Alice having sex with the naval officer, Bill sets off into a seemingly endless New York night, in which Bill increasingly indulges the danger and excitement of defying societal norms and embracing immorality.
This is most clearly embodied in the film’s most controversial scene, in which, after convincing Nightingale to reveal the existence and location of the masked orgy of a secret society at a secluded mansion, a masked Bill visits the mansion, where he witnesses various rituals and sexual acts before he’s unmasked. What could have been an unintentionally hilarious scene, with the garish costumes and occultist music, instead highlights the frightening extent to which Bill has entered a sexual abyss, despite the fact that Bill never actually has sex in the film. Indeed, a running joke in Eyes Wide Shut is that while virtually every character whom Bill encounters in the film exhibits some degree of sexual attraction to him, he doesn’t get any satisfaction.
Tom Cruise’s 2001 Psychological Thriller Is an Excellent Companion Piece To ‘Eyes Wide Shut’
Warner Bros.
Through its exploration of the shifting perception of reality, Eyes Wide Shut resembles Tom Cruise’s 2001 psychological thriller film Vanilla Sky, in which Cruise plays David Aames, a hedonistic New York playboy whose carefree lifestyle is completely upended after the handsome David is severely disfigured in a car crash. Like Bill Harford in Eyes Wide Shut, David’s struggle to distinguish between fantasy and reality leads him to question the validity of his very existence. Just as Eyes Wide Shut puts Bill in the position of having to differentiate between reality and his subconscious instincts, David finds himself unable to trust his eyes and thoughts amid compelling evidence that his world is the product of his imagination.
Related
25 Years Later, Stanley Kubrick’s Final Movie Is Still Puzzling
Eyes Wide Shut is a fitting conclusion to a filmography that continues to spark conversation and interpretation.
Bill and David both discover that wish-fulfillment fantasies often have horrific consequences. For David, this relates to cryonic suspension and the realization that the idyllic world that David has inhabited since leaving reality is controlled through his lucid dream state. While Bill is eventually dissuaded from investigating the secret society further through fear and intimidation, David, after discovering the reality of his existence, decides to pursue immortality in a world where everyone and everything he loved in his previous life is gone.
‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Has To Be Seen More Than Once
Warner Bros.
Eyes Wide Shut endures as a spellbinding mystery in which the audience is perfectly aligned with Tom Cruise’s Bill Harford in Bill’s desperate attempt to apply logic to the nightmarish events that he experiences throughout the film. Bill, like the audience, is especially suspicious that his old friend, Nick Nightingale, has been abducted and murdered for the crime of giving Bill admittance to the masked orgy at the mansion. He also suspects that the young woman who overdosed at Victor Ziegler’s Christmas party was also murdered for aiding him at the mansion.
Bill shares these suspicions with the powerful Victor in a scene in which everything he says to Bill has a dual meaning. Victor tells Bill that Nightingale left New York safely and is presumably back home with his family, while the drug-addicted woman died from her addiction, as the police apparently concluded. This sounds reasonable enough to Bill, just as it did to audiences when Eyes Wide Shut was released in 1999. However, nearly 25 years later, serious doubts exist. Indeed, while Nightingale’s status can seemingly be easily verified, with just a phone call, what Victor seems to be really telling Bill in this scene appears tantamount to a last friendly warning for him to forget everything he’s seen and stop asking questions. Eyes Wide Shut is available to rent on Apple TV+.
You can view the original article HERE.
