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Eyes
Wide Shut
viewed November 20, 1999 at the Red Vic
For full
information about this film, click
here
The Red Vic on Haight Street is a quaint
single-screen theater, owned by its operators and
featuring a great schedule of recent and classic
films. The staff is exceptionally considerate, as
I discovered upon being the last person in the ticket
line for a packed revival of Eyes Wide Shut, when
they offered to refund my ticket if I couldn't find a
good seat. I found a seat right in the middle of
the front row, which was slightly painful but offered
a virtual reality-type immersion into the
film. (This reminded me of when a friend once told
our high school teacher about his stiff neck after
sitting in the front row for a screening of Basic
Instinct. Our teacher replied, "I bet
that's not all that was stiff.")
The immersion into the screen was fitting to this
dreamlike movie. Kubrick had a reputation as
a control freak who would take countless takes of any
given shot, but such manipulation of his actors and
scenes is remarkably apt in a film that has the
staginess of a dream. The stilted manner in which
most of the actors speak, the grand, lush interiors and
especially the deliberate pacing of the plot contribute
to an effect that harbors itself in the caverns of
consciousness. This movie, with its approximations
of New York locales and an ornate design that is
delightfully outdated, cannot be criticized for being
unrealistic, because it creates reality in its own
terms, like the exquisite remote quality of a
great silent movie.
Technically speaking, there is much to love about the
film. Virtually every scene is dazzlingly well
lit, from the brilliant curtain of Christmas lights in
the opening ballroom sequence, to the harsh contrast of
light and shadow during the orgy ritual. The repetition
throughout the movie of high-contrast
orange/blue color motifs as well as the moody Ligeti piano
melodies linger in the mind for days. The measured
plot structure also renders each scene distinct and easy
to recollect in sequence. It seems that Kubrick
has found the right rhythm for cinematic storytelling to
reverberate in one's subconscious recollection.
Within that deliberate rhythm there is a lot of
range in tone, from dramatic to comic, to erotic, to
surreal.
The nature of this story, about a man's evening of
sexual adventures incited by his wife's fantasies, could
be construed as a moral tale, but I think Kubrick's
focus isn't so much on proper marital conduct as it is
on what, if anything, separates the realms of dream and
reality, thought and deed. Nicole Kidman has only
a handful of scenes, but her two adulterous monologues
cast such a shadow on the pride of Tom Cruise's
character that her dreams motivate all of his subsequent
actions and pervade the film's fabric of
reality.
What transpires on his wild night unravels very
slowly (to the dismay of many viewers) but is still hard
to get a handle on (unless you want to dismiss the
entire experience as pretentious crap). Finally,
when the Zeus-like Ziegler offers an explanation in his
Olympian billiards room, all we get is more uncertainty
over the facts. It is a masterpiece of a scene,
with Sydney Pollack's Ziegler as the least-affected,
most nuanced performance in the film, so
matter-of-factly offering truth, that it can't be
believed.
The film cast a spell on me, like Kidman's monologues
did to Cruise. Like Cruise, I started noticing
people around me, wondering about them and whether they
noticed me. The two young Asian girls next to me
-- what were they doing at this movie? Didn't they
have some other place to go on a Saturday night?
Were they wondering what I was doing here by
myself? The movie made me feel how unnaturally
cramped it is to sit in the front row of a crowded
theater -- but as much as it pushed my reflections out
to my surroundings, it also opened itself on the screen
for me to indulge in its fantasies and fears.
Afterwards I walked down the rain-slicked sidewalks of
the Haight, just wondering if anything would
happen. When nothing did, I took the car home, but
then decided to follow the 49-mile scenic drive signs to
see where they would take me. I ended up going
halfway up Twin Peaks but took a wrong turn before
reaching to top. After weaving and wandering for
half an hour I ended up back on the Haight, where I
started -- how fitting.
The Chicago critics really loved this movie: read Roger
Ebert and Jonathan
Rosenbaum.
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