Stanley Krubrick's last film is a visual feast and a bizzarre sex-capade.
Eyes Wide shut** Cover your eyes Eyes Wide Shut follows Alice (Nicole Kidman) and Dr. Bill (Tom Cruise) Harford, wealthy New Yorkers, to a friend’s Christmas party. Bill talks to an acquaintance, attends to a female guest suffering from a drug overdose and deals with two flirtatious models, while Alice drinks champagne and fends off an aging Hungarian. At home smoking a joint the next night, Alice reveals to Bill that she has been having erotic fantasies about a naval officer she met the summer before. Faced with the prospect of a marriage that demands participation rather than maintenance, Bill leaves to visit a patient, but instead of returning home, he prowls the dark city streets, repeatedly envisioning his wife’s imaginary affair. His compulsive dream-like exploration takes him into New York’s sexual underground, which turns out to be more dangerous than he had anticipated. The last film directed by the late Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange), Eyes Wide Shut is like a large, late-night meal — it takes a long time to digest. Deliberate and haunting, the two-hour, 39-minute production is sex on a grand scale, intimate and detached. Kubrick puts his characters in compelling settings, where they are all but engulfed by the swirl of light, color and sound. Resembling an expensive art flick, the film is suffused with an annoying sepia graininess. Jocelyn Pook’s score relies on pronounced piano notes that are effective, but irritating. Real-life husband and wife Cruise and Kidman sacrificed over a year and a half to film Kubrick’s sex-capade. Unfortunately, the result is more like Edgar Allan Poe meets Playboy Club.