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Music Review
Sharps & flats
Pastoral pop group Belle and Sebastian finally re-release their out of print debut "Tigermilk," which once sold for $1,200. The excellent disc is worth the long wait, if not the inflated auction price.
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From "Tootsie" to "Eyes Wide Shut"
Sydney Pollack directed Dustin Hoffman romping around in a skirt. Now he's co-starring as the orgy master who guides Tom Cruise through the debaucherous center of Stanley Kubrick's final film.
By Michael Sragow
[07/15/99]

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[07/14/99]

Movie Interview
Something wicked
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By Brett Mannes
[07/13/99]

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That obsessive precision, combined with the misanthropy Kubrick's films expressed, worked to make the actors nearly irrelevant. Throughout "Eyes Wide Shut" the actors are held immobile in static close-ups or positioned against cavernous sets that appear ready to swallow them up. Perhaps it would have been a relief for the director if they had been swallowed up; then there would have been nothing to interfere with the presentation of his sets, the depth of focus, the exactitude of every overlit shot.

Eyes Wide Shut Directed by Stanley Kubrick Starring Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and Sydney Pollack

"Eyes Wide Shut," "inspired" by Arthur Schnitzler's "Traumnovelle," is a sexual melodrama done in an imperial style. Imagine a Pinter play directed by Napoleon. Pinter would kill for the pauses in this movie. Even when the characters are talking, the dialogue comes out as if it were being uttered in an echo chamber. In that Times Magazine article, Matthew Modine said, "He couldn't understand why anybody would want to go anyplace. Why his children would want to go to university," and reported that Kubrick said, "You don't have to go away to find something. Everything can be brought to you."

And that's how Kubrick worked, taking years to complete projects, keeping them veiled in secrecy, not leaving England since he moved there in the '60s. Kubrick created a laboratory from which he issued movies that appear untouched by human hands. Except for a few of the supporting performances, nothing in "Eyes Wide Shut," which is set in Manhattan, feels like it has a connection to any recognizable notion of urban life or human behavior. The movie's Manhattan (shot, except for a few second-unit establishing shots, on sets in London) is the least populated you'll ever see. That sealed-off feeling might have had some charge if we had the sense that we'd entered a king director's fevered fantasy life.

But nothing in "Eyes Wide Shut" betrays that Kubrick had wanted for 30 years to make a film of Schnitzler's novella. It doesn't have the visionary craziness that can sometimes energize even mucked-up dream projects. And its subject -- a married couple whose jealousy of each other's sexual fantasies spurs them to pursue those fantasies -- is wildly inappropriate for the director.

To borrow an old Robin Williams line, Stanley Kubrick on sex is like Gandhi on catering. Kubrick's style and sensibility were particularly unsuited to sensuality. The filmmaker capable of the erotic tenderness of the credit sequence of "Lolita" (where we see a man's hands delicately painting a young girl's toenails) was long ago subsumed by the technician. (You sense the ghost of that tenderness in the close-ups of Leelee Sobieski as a teenage hooker. What a Lolita she would have made.)

Kubrick and his screenwriter, Frederic Raphael have transferred Schnitzler's well-heeled bourgeois couple to present-day New York, where they live in a Central Park West apartment. The central character (here called Bill Harford and played by Cruise) is still a doctor, though his wife (named Alice and played by Nicole Kidman) is now a former art gallery manager. The circles they move in are those of wealthy Manhattanites. The Christmas party that opens the movie is Kubrick's version of the slightly sinister ball the couple have just attended when the Schnitzler opens. Schnitzler is deliberately vague about the threat his couple feels at the ball; as the novella goes on that threat becomes the couples' own fear about the temptation they feel to betray their vows of fidelity. Kubrick bypasses erotic temptation to go straight for a moralistic view of bourgeois decadence. Cruise is called to attend to a young woman who's OD'd during sex while Kidman is downstairs dancing with some silver-haired Lothario who acts like the lead in a community theater production of "Dracula." The naked body of the girl Cruise cares for is presented for our delectation, as if the sight of a naked woman zonked on a speedball holds some erotic allure.

Schnitzler's "Traumnovelle" never denies the danger that's part of the allure of sex. The melodramatic conventions that dominate the story after the doctor crashes a mysterious orgy and (it's inferred) escapes with his life are Schnitzler's metaphor for the possibility that giving in to temptation will destroy you. But Schnitzler's prose was that of a dedicated sensualist and voyeur. He never denies the appeal of giving in to temptation, and the lushness of the writing makes you want to slow down and savor it even as it carries you through the story: "Fridolin's eyes roved hungrily from sensuous to slender figures, and from budding figures to figures in glorious full bloom; -- and the fact that each of these naked beauties still remained a mystery, and that from behind the masks large eyes as unfathomable as riddles sparkled out at him, transformed his indescribably strong urge to watch with an almost intolerable torment of desire."

Next page | The big orgy sequence: Kubrick goes whole hog