Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut
theatrical release poster
Directed by	Stanley Kubrick
Written by	Novella: Arthur Schnitzler Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick Frederic Raphael
Produced by	Stanley Kubrick
Starring	Tom Cruise Nicole Kidman
Cinematography	Larry Smith
Edited by	Nigel Galt
Music by	Jocelyn Pook
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date	July 16, Template:Fy
Running time	159 min.
Country	Template:FilmUK / Template:FilmUS
Language
Budget	$65 million
Box office	$55,691,208 (domestic) $160,637,680 (worldwide)

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is a psychological drama with many elements of an erotic thriller considered by some a cult movie directed, produced and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, based on the novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story) by Arthur Schnitzler. It was Kubrick's last film before his death. The story, set in and around New York City, follows the surreal, sexually charged adventures of Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise), who is shocked after his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), reveals she contemplated an affair a year earlier. This leads him on a night-long, eventful sexual adventure, which climaxes with him infiltrating a masked orgy.

The film appeared on 16 July 1999 to generally positive critical reaction.

Plot

The film begins in the apartment of a wealthy, married couple, Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman), who are preparing for a Christmas party at the home of Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), a friend and patient of Bill's. During the party, a Hungarian man (Sky du Mont) tries to seduce Alice, while two younger models try to seduce Bill. Alice and Bill both resist temptations. During the party, Bill is summoned by Ziegler to his bathroom where he finds a naked woman, Mandy (Julienne Davis), over-dosed from a speedball. Bill helps her regain consciousness and promises Victor he will not speak of the event. Bill also meets an old friend, Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), a former fellow student who dropped out of medical school and is now a pianist at the party. Nick informs Bill that he is playing at the Sonata Café.

The day after the party, Alice and Bill smoke marijuana and talk about encounters at the party. Alice confesses her feelings concerning a naval officer she saw while in Cape Cod. Because of Bill's self-assurance, out of spite she admits she was willing to abandon her future for one night with the officer. Shocked, Bill suddenly receives a telephone call summoning him to a deceased patient's home. Bill goes to the patient and the daughter, Marion (Marie Richardson), says she wants to give up her life to be with Bill. Bill resists and departs once Marion's boyfriend Carl (Thomas Gibson) arrives.

While wandering the streets, rowdy men, taking him for gay, taunt him and walk into him. A female prostitute named Domino (Vinessa Shaw) approaches Bill and solicits him. Bill accepts, but a call from Alice cuts their business after a kiss. Bill insists on paying.

He happens upon a sign outside the jazz club where Nick is piano player. As the two discuss things, Nick describes a party the night before where he is to play again tonight. Bill coerces Nick into divulging the party's requirements: a black robe with a hood, and a mask. He learns the location and the password: Fidelio.

Bill goes to the costume shop of a friend only to find it has a new owner, Mr Milich (Rade Šerbedžija). He bribes Milich to get a costume immediately.

Bill takes a cab to the party in a mansion on Long Island. What he finds inside is a hierogamy-inspired sexual ritual (orgy) involving women clad in masks and G-strings and led by an ominous man dressed and masked in red (Leon Vitali). Men and women watch, masked and clad in black robes, reminiscent of a Venetian Carnival. Nick plays the organ blindfolded. As the women rise from a circle surrounding a priest-like figure, they select men from the audience. One of the masked men stares at Bill for a short time, and a mysterious woman selects Bill and informs him that he is in danger and urges him to leave, but he refuses.

He is discovered as an outsider and forced to remove his mask. The red-robed master of ceremonies demands he disrobe, but his "punishment" is "redeemed" by the mysterious woman who tried to warn him earlier. Bill is threatened to remain quiet about what he saw or suffer, then returns home.

Bill finds Alice laughing in her sleep. After waking her, she tells him of her dream. She was having sex with other men, and she knew that Bill was watching, so she laughed at him.

The following day, Bill decides to investigate what happened. He goes to the hotel at which Nick was staying and finds from the front desk clerk that Nick has apparently been brutalized for telling Bill about the party and password, and is now gone. Bill returns the costume to the shop where another sexually charged situation involving Milich's teenage daughter (Leelee Sobieski) and two Japanese men follows. Mr. Milich also offers his daughter as a prostitute to Bill. He returns to the mansion, but is warned off. Bill goes to Domino's apartment where he learns from her roommate that Domino received results of a blood test, which said she was HIV positive. Amanda Curran, the woman who "redeemed" Bill, is dead, ostensibly of a drug overdose behind a locked apartment door. Bill goes to the morgue and learns this woman is Mandy, whom Bill had helped to revive at Ziegler's party. He is unable to establish that the woman did die simply of a drug overdose. Bill is then called to Victor Ziegler's home, where the millionaire claims he was one of those at the ritual and that nothing further was done; according to him, Amanda was a drug-addicted prostitute and Nick was allowed to leave without further punishment. Both here and in the orgy it is implied that Ziegler was the masked man staring at Bill and that he summoned Amanda to "redeem" his friend. No evidence is presented, however, concerning the fate of Amanda and Nick, and Bill and the audience are left to decide between the explanation given to him or a possible double murder. Ziegler does warn Bill against investigating further, as some of the masked participants are said to be powerful members of society.

Bill returns home to Alice and finds the mask he wore to the party on the pillow next to her. He breaks down crying, waking Alice before confessing about his journey. While Christmas shopping later that morning, Alice shows she has come to terms with Bill's actions by accepting that one night does not reflect his entire persona.

Comparison with Dream Story

The 1926 novella Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler is set (somewhat earlier than its publishing date) in and around Vienna after the turn of the century, not New York City in the 1990s. The couple are named Fridolin and Albertina, and their home is a typical suburban middle-class home, not the posh urban apartment seen in the film.

The couple are also Jewish in the novella. According to historian Geoffrey Cocks, Kubrick (himself Jewish) frequently removed references to the Jewishness of characters in the novels he adapted. This is reflected in the film by the fact that when Bill Harford is going home he is taunted by some young boys in the street with anti-gay slurs. In the novella, these are anti-Semitic slurs.

In the novella, the woman who "redeems" Fridolin at the sex party, saving him from punishment, is costumed like a nun; and most of the characters at this party are costumed like nuns or priests—an element removed from the film, although the chanting and incense seen at the orgy may seem loosely religious, but are more like a Black Mass than a Christian worship service.

When Fridolin returns home, Albertina's dream is an elaborate drama that concludes with him getting crucified in a village square after Albertina fails to speak up on his behalf, given that she is now occupied with copulating with other men. Thus in the novella there is a parallelism between the woman dressed like a nun at the orgy saving Fridolin from punishment (by offering to be punished in his place), and his wife failing to do the same in a dream, which has disappeared from the film version.

The novella has a clear explanation as to why the husband's mask ends up on the pillow of his bed next to his sleeping wife. In the film this is enigmatic.

The character of Dr. Ziegler (who represents the high wealth and prestige to which Bill Harford aspires) is entirely an invention of the film, having no counterpart in the novella at all

Cast

• Tom Cruise as Dr. William "Bill" Harford
• Nicole Kidman as Alice Harford
• Sydney Pollack as Victor Ziegler
• Todd Field as Nick Nightingale
• Sky du Mont as Sandor Szavost
• Rade Šerbedžija as Mr. Milich
• Vinessa Shaw as Domino
• Leelee Sobieski as Milich's Daughter
• Alan Cumming as Hotel Desk Clerk
• Leon Vitali as Red Cloak

Reception

The film opened with mixed to positive reviews. The film currently holds a 78% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics objected to two features. First, the movie's pacing is slow. While this may have been intended to convey dreaming, critics objected that it made actions and decisions laborious. Second, reviewers commented that Kubrick had shot his NYC scenes in a studio and that New York "didn't look like New York." Lee Siegel, in Harper's, felt that most critics responded mainly to the marketing campaign and did not address the film on its own terms. Others feel that American censorship took an esoteric film and made it even harder to understand.

In the television show Roger Ebert & the Movies, director Martin Scorsese named Eyes Wide Shut his fourth favorite film of the 1990s. For the introduction to Michel Ciment's Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Scorsese wrote: "When Eyes Wide Shut came out a few months after Stanley Kubrick's death in 1999, it was severely misunderstood, which came as no surprise. If you go back and look at the contemporary reactions to any Kubrick picture (except the earliest ones), you'll see that all his films were initially misunderstood. Then, after five or ten years came the realization that 2001 or Barry Lyndon or The Shining was like nothing else before or since."

Music

• The opening title music is "Waltz 2 from Shostakovich's Suite for Variety Stage Orchestra", for years misidentified as the composer's Jazz Suite 2, recorded and released under the incorrect name by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
• In the ritual, the incantations in the background are in Romanian, played backwards. The piece, named "Masked Ball", is an adaptation by Jocelyn Pook of her "Backwards Priests." When contacting Pook in regard to providing music for the film, Kubrick asked if she had anything else like Backwards Priests - "you know, weird."
• One recurring piece is the second movement of György Ligeti's piano cycle "Musica ricercata". The fact that the piece uses only three tones, the dissonance created by these tones, and the unyielding performance indication of Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale adds to the unsettling nature .
• In the morgue scene, Franz Liszt's late solo piano piece, "Nuages Gris" ("Grey Clouds") (1881) is heard.
• "Rex tremendae" from Mozart's Requiem plays as Bill walks into the Viennese cafe and reads of Mandy's death.
• The background score during the orgy (where Tom Cruise walks from room to room) is a Tamil song sung by Manickam Yogeswaran who is a Carnatic singer.

Controversies

Claims about Kubrick's opinion of the film

R. Lee Ermey, who played the menacing drill instructor in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), claimed that Kubrick phoned him two weeks before his death to express his despondency over Eyes Wide Shut. "He told me it was a piece of shit", Ermey said in Radar magazine, "and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him — exactly the words he used."

Jan Harlan, Kubrick's brother-in-law and executive producer, reported that Kubrick was "very happy" with the film. According to Todd Field, Kubrick's friend and an actor in Eyes Wide Shut, Ermey's claims are slanderous. Field's response appeared in an October 26, 2006 interview with Slashfilm.com:

The polite thing would be to say 'No comment'. But the truth is that... let's put it this way, you've never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director. Stanley was absolutely thrilled with the film. He was still working on the film when he died. And he probably died because he finally relaxed. It was one of the happiest weekends of his life, right before he died, after he had shown the first cut to Terry, Tom and Nicole. He would have kept working on it, like he did on all of his films. But I know that from people around him personally, my partner who was his assistant for thirty years. And I thought about R. Lee Ermey for In the Bedroom. And I talked to Stanley a lot about that film, and all I can say is Stanley was adamant that I shouldn't work with him for all kinds of reasons that I won't get into because there is no reason to do that to anyone, even if they are saying slanderous things that I know are completely untrue.

American censorship controversy

Citing contractual obligations to deliver an R rating, Warner Bros. digitally altered the orgy for the American release, blocking out graphic sexuality by inserting additional figures to obscure the view, avoiding an adults-only NC-17 rating that limited distribution, as some large American theaters and video store operators disallow films with that rating. This alteration antagonized cinephiles, as they argued that Kubrick had never been shy about ratings: A Clockwork Orange was originally given an X-rating. The unrated version of Eyes Wide Shut was released in the United States on October 23, 2007 in DVD, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats.

The version in South America, Europe and Australia featured the orgy scene intact (theatrical and DVD release) with ratings mostly for people of 16 (Germany) and 18+ (Australia). In New Zealand and in Europe, the uncensored version has been shown on television with some controversy. In Australia, it was broadcast on Network Ten with the alterations in the American version for mature audiences of 15 and older, blurring and cutting explicit sexuality.

Roger Ebert has been misquoted as calling the standard North American R-rated version the "Austin Powers" version of "Eyes Wide Shut". This is presumably in reference to two scenes in the first Powers movie Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery in which through camera angles and coincidences body parts are blocked in a comical way. In fact, Ebert saw a rough draft of the altered orgy scene which was not used. It is this that he called the "Austin Powers" version, not the final R-rated version released in North America. Nonetheless many discussions have misquoted Ebert.

Controversy regarding the chanting of Hindu prayers

While American censorship attempted to control the sexuality, complaints came from offended members of the Hindu community. The American Hindus Against Defamation [1] wrote to Warner Brothers requesting they change the voice-over chant that plays as Bill Harford wanders from room to room at the mansion. According to the AHAD, "the background music subsides and the shloka (scriptural recitation) from the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most revered Hindu scripture is played out." But, in reality, a Tamil love song (Ithu kadala, ithu naragama?, meaning Is it love, is it hell?) was being played — never any shloka or Hindu prayers.

When Warner did not concede, the American Hindus Against Defamation threatened to protest. Eventually, Warner Brothers agreed with the Hindu community of Great Britain to replace it with a chant of similar dramatic tone. These changes were not made in North America.

DVD release

The DVD release of Eyes Wide Shut corrects technical gaffes, including a reflected crew member, and altering a piece of Nicole Kidman's dialogue. Most home videos remove the "so-called" Hindu prayer.

The scene in which Kidman dances naked in front of a mirror has been zoomed in on DVD copies after Cruise enters the room.

The earliest American DVD of the uncut version states on the cover that it includes both the R-rated and unrated editions; only the unrated edition is on the DVD.

See also

• Emotional inertia

External links

• Official website
• Eyes Wide Shut at IMDb
• Eyes Wide Shut at the TCM Movie Database
• Eyes Wide Shut at AllMovie
• Eyes Wide Shut at Rotten Tomatoes
• Eyes Wide Shut at Metacritic
• Introducing Sociology: a review of Eyes Wide Shut by Tim Kreider