I wish I hadn't seen it

Spectator, The, Sep 11, 1999 by Young, Toby

Eyes Wide Shut

(18, selected cinemas)

It's a pity Stanley Kubrick died a day after turning in his final cut of Eyes Wide Shut since it meant Warner Bros. had no choice but to respect its agreement with the directpr not to alter a single frame.

Kubrick had a reputation as a prefectionist, a control freak who obsessed over every tiny detail, but Eyes Wide Shut is a mess, a puzzlingly amateurish film. It's disjointed and uneven and - at 159 minutes - at least half an hour too long. If only Kubrick had died a day before he'd finished it. That way Warner Bros. ould have had an excuse to 'fix' it in post-production. It would have made it worse, of course, but at least then we couls have blamed its awfulness on the studio. As it is, it's a terribly disappointing end to Kubrick's career. Walking out of the cinema, I found myself wishing I hadn't seen it.

The inspiration for the film comes from a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler called Traumnovelle, a parable about the dangers of giving free rein to your sexual appetites. Kubrick hired the novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael to update the story, setting it in contemporary New York, but unfortunately the blame can't be shifted to him either. In a self-serving article in the Ne wYorker, Raphael explained that his brilliant screenplay was butchered by Kubrick who pared it down to its bare essentials. What excited Kubrick about Schnitzler's story was its Freudian psychology, the idea that civilised human conduct is crucially dependent on sexual repression. Kubrick had always been fascinated by man in his most primitive, inhuman state. In his last film, Full Metal Jacket, teh characters are brutakised by the US Army which successfully transforms them into killing machines. In Eyes Wide Shut, its naked human flesh (and plenty of it) that turns his characters into beasts - snorting, rutting beasts.

The protagonists, played by real-life husband and wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, are an affluent, happily married couple who, in the course of the film are exposed to a series of increasingly bizarre temptations. The point of their various trials is to illustrate that their happiness rests on an extremely precarious foundation. In a pivotal scene Kidman reveals that she almost abandoned Cruise and their young daughter for a soldier she happened to see in a crowded hotel lobby. Will they risk everything for one night of depravity, as they both seem inclined to do, or remain faithful to one another?

In the right hands a cinematic parable about the terrible consequences of giving in to sexual temptation could have been quite entertaining, an opportunity to show lots of nudity with some Freudian psychoanalysis thrown in to make it respectable. Roman Polanski, for instance, might have had some fun with it. But Kubrick is in deadly earnest here, apparently under the impression that he's communicating some profound, piercing insight into the human condition. The story moves along at a stately, funereal pace and the copious sex scenes, including a full-blown orgy, are peculiarly bloodless. He struggles to give these passages an unsettling, dream-like quality but never relinquishes sufficient control to carry it off. Kubrick's imagination was too cerebral, his style too formal, to inject these scenes with any erotic heat.

Eyes Wide Shut is by no means an unqualified failure. There are three or four set-pieces that bear all the hallmarks of Kubrick at his best: his painstaking craftsmanship, his formal perfectionism, his logical, geometric sensibility. In one memorable scene, Kubrick's camera follows Cruise as he pilots his way through a hospital to the mortuary in its bowels, capturing its bland, antiseptic atmosphere. Kubrick was very much at home in these over-ordered, slightly sinister environments, even when they were in outer space. But when he entered inner space - when he attempted to explore the less tangible terrain of the human psyche - his mathematical style let him down. In Eyes Wide Shut there's a mismatch between his technique and his material.

Some American critics complained about Tom Cruise's wooden performance, but Kubrick boxes him in so tightly there's very little he can do. Because he's required to play an archetype, an everyman stripped of any individuating personality traits, he has no means of bringing the character to life. Nicole Kidman's role is a bit more meaty, and she has two or three good scenes, but her performance is a little too reminiscent of Shelley Duvall's in The Shining. Kubrick was suspiciously fond of putting his lead actresses through the mill, wearing them down until they were a bundle of frayed nerves.

In America, Eyes Wide Shut hasn't been the commercial success that Warner Bros had hoped and the studio is now banking on a favourable response in Europe to recoup its costs. I doubt it will happen. Die-hard Kubrick fans will almost certainly go to see it but I suspect even they will be disappointed.