EYES WIDE SHUT (71) (74 - second viewing)

Directed by: Stanley Kubrick

Starring: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack

The Pitch: A happily-married doctor is stunned to learn that his wife harbours sexual fantasies about another man.

Theo Sez: One to swim around in, fishing for themes and symbols - the recurring emphasis on money (a substitute for sexual potency?) or the coded Author's Message in the final scene ("That's pretty" ; "It's old-fashioned") - or just wallowing in its dreamlike atmosphere. It is of course a dream, inescapably (if implicitly) so, the key scene probably the one early on where the (stereo)typical difference between men and women is reiterated - women are faithful, men fool around - leaving our uxorious hero wondering if he's less of a man for resisting temptation (a theme echoed in the gay-baiting louts and the mincing hotel clerk - neither, apparently, in the original novel). That seems to be where the criticisms about reactionary sexual politics miss the point a little, even though the film is a cautionary tale of sorts, and sees infidelity in rather grotesque terms (equating it with Aids, prostitution, pedophilia, necrophilia) - but its hero isn't a smug, arrogant man who has to be 'punished' (as, e.g. Michael Douglas was in FATAL ATTRACTION), more a rather pathetic lost soul, wandering passively, with only his bulging wallet for comfort, through a stylised New York in the film's hypnotically good first half : the whole thing is a nightmare of masculine insecurities, the ending suggesting that only monogamy is, in the end, stable enough to appease them. It's also rather heavy-handed, frittering itself away in a sluggish final hour (though on second viewing it seems vital to its suggestive, incantatory quality, rather like the way it stretches out Time by having characters repeat what's just been said to them). Eccentric, mostly in a good way - and, if nothing else, you have to laugh at (i.e with) the way Kubrick uses (and undoubtedly stoked) the sexiest-film-ever hype, opening with a butt-shot and ending with the word "fuck", as if mocking our prurient disappointment at finding little in between. Could the eyes wide shut be our own, wilfully blind even in the midst of media-overload?...