Eyes Wide Shut

And so are Kubrick's, until the picture's final scene, when he decides he needs to wrap everything up in a nice, neat little package. His mouthpiece is Alice, who tells her husband that maybe all they've been going through is just a dream. But as we all know, a dream is never just a dream. And maybe, now that they are awake, what they should feel is grateful: grateful that they have been able to survive all the temptations placed in their paths, to be together after all their adventures. The audience, of course, wonders: What temptations? What adventures? From where we sit, their only challenge was a couple of mildly bad dreams. No real danger threatened them, and nothing really was at stake.

What is interesting, though, is that at least in subject matter, Eyes Wide Shut deals more with the problems of normal, everyday life than perhaps any movie Kubrick has ever made. In this sense, it is his most personal, most mature work. Unfortunately, what it reveals is that of all the subjects he might have chosen, this was the one about which he was least familiar. As a result, Eyes Wide Shut comes off as an attempt by the director, near the end of his life, to come to terms not with the future, or outer space, or creation, or war, but something so small and vital as the emotional life of a couple. Perhaps it was his attempt to return to the real world of feelings and emotions.

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick's final film is ponderous, often inscrutable and, ultimately, not much fun.

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More About

• Stanley Kubrick
• Nicole Kidman
• Tom Cruise
• William Harford
• Sydney Pollack

This makes his failure here — and his death — all the more poignant. As a filmmaker, he was still young. The saddest fact is that we will never know whether, indeed, this film signaled a change of direction, or whether he would in subsequent films have blasted off again into other worlds. And for that we can never feel grateful.