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A Very Kubrick Christmas
Other | Thursday 27th November 2014 | Matt
It's that time of year again, and what better way to celebrate than with a voyage into the twisted sexual underbelly of New York's glitterati? Stanley Kubrick's final picture before his untimely death, Eyes Wide Shut, turns the concept of the Christmas film on its head, utilising the season of familial love as an ubiquitous reminder of our ability to buy into an illusory notion: be it ole' St. Nick or the assured and continued sexual fidelity of our better half. Kubrick's opus touches on universal themes of love, guilt, fear and tempation, framed through the prism of a well-to-do cosmopolitan couple. Try as he might, Tom Cruise will probably never appear normal to most people, yet there's an intimacy and sincerity to his on-screen relationship with then-wife Nicole Kidman to give you the warm Holiday feels, even if his exploits take the pair into dark and fractious emotional territory. It could even be said the picture contains the closest thing to a happy ending in Kubrick's entire ouvre, just in case this is all sounding a bit bah humbug for you.
Adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novel, Traumnovelle (dream story), Eyes Wide Shut follows socialites Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise) and his wife, Alice (Kidman) as the pair's proximity to the sexual profligacy of the debutante party scene raises questions of infidelity for the pair. While attending a lavish Christmas party thrown by an affluent patient of his, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), the pair go their seperate ways and engage in a bit of abortive yet sexually charged flirtation. Alice with a smooth talking European silver fox, and Bill with a pair of nubile young models. The next night, they smoke a joint and probe each other on their dalliances. The mood rapidly sours after Alice confesses to Bill a secret desire for a young naval officer the pair encountered on holiday a few years ago. Reeling from this revelation, Bill goes on the hunt for some extra-marital sex of his own, but is thwarted at every turn, his figurative impotence ever deepening. Drinking away his troubles in a jazz bar, Bill bumps into a pianist friend of his from Ziegler's party, Nick Nightingale (Todd Field). Nick tells him he has an engagement later that night playing blindfolded for a private party. Intrigued, Bill presses him to discover that attendees of this mysterious soirée must be in possession of a mask, a costume, and the password: fidelio. After acquiring the costume, Bill takes a cab to the country mansion where the event is taking place. Upon entering, we are confronted with a bizarre, quasi-satanic ritual orgy, complete with corrupted Catholic iconography and a truly chilling musical motif that features a reversed and distorted Latin mass, played by a blindfolded Nick. After being warned off by a mysterious masked woman, Bill is rumbled as an interloper and brought before the gathering. The same woman reappears and offers herself to the group to secure Bill's safety. He is unceremoniously evicted with a stern warning that any further investigation of the events he has witnessed will bring swift and exacting retribution from the group. So begins a campaign of insidious intimidation as Cruise's troubled search for the truth takes him to the edges of what he knows to be true, and begins to unravel his perception of the life he has built for himself with Alice.
Critically maligned upon its release and tragically condemned to a diminished standing in the director's canon ever since, Eyes Wide Shut represents an enduring masterpiece of profoundly human film-making. Whilst Bill's nightmare encounter with the orgy is ostensibly the centrepiece of the film, after repeated viewings we begin to engage less with the mystery aspect of the plot and instead come to relate Bill's experiences back to his psychosexual conundrum. Scorned by his wife and constantly thwarted in his attempts at wilful infidelity, Cruise is disarmingly capable at confounding his media image of the toothy, desirable wünderkind in his portrayal of a man wracked by an emasculating jealousy that threatens to consume him. The vague unreality of the Christmas atmosphere, all evanescent twinkling lights and warm, saturated colour, serves to enhance the fragmentary nature of Bill's psyche, as he struggles to delineate between dream, nightmare and his wider waking life. Alice and Bill's domestic interaction is also disarmingly uncanny, as astute critic Calum Marsh points out, 'every ordinary moment and quotidian gesture seems disquieting and surreal'. During Alice's revelation of desire for the naval officer, this combination of the worldly and preternaturally unsettling is channeled through Kubrick's direction, building the pace of the cuts steadily to match the emotional crescendo of the scene, emphasising the distance between the couple despite their physical proximity. Kidman's performance here is captivating: deliberately faltering, emphasising bizarre syntactic pauses that break up the flow of her dialogue in a curious and disarming way, all the time framed beneath a numinous blue light from outside the window.
This is just an example of the depth of human feeling the ostensibly cold, overly techincal Kubrick was able to express through his filmmaking, and as a swansong feature Eyes Wide Shut is a fittingly challenging and uncompromising expression of the director's idiosyncratic mastery of the medium. If watching this bona fide masterpiece hasn't quite yet become a christmas tradition in your house, it probably should. Like any Kubrick picture, Eyes Wide Shut cries out for multiple viewings, and the experience deepens and matures with the viewer, continuing to communicate with us in new ways.
