
It was inevitable that with the closed eyes of Stanley Kubrick would be greatest most misunderstood film of 1999. Kubrick died four months before its release, and no end to speculation how much he would have played with the image has changed, "fixed" it. We'll never know. But even without the haunting enigma of the director's death - and their mysterious echo / anticipation in the scene when Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) visits the deathbed of one of his patients - Close your eyes and bewildered spectators had polarized, and reviewers. After all, almost all Kubrick films, after the United States had only race of 1964 Dr. Strangelove opened to something like a consensus. Apart from the author's tinkering, Kubrick's films have always seemed to change - partly because it has changed, changed the world and how we have known and understood. And we may expect Eyes Wide Shut to do the same. Unlike Kubrick, who has time.
Then consider that we settle in to live this long, advisedly slow, mesmerizing film, how challenging and ambiguous its narrative strategy is. The source is a novel by Arthur Schnitzler entitled Traumnovelle (or "Dream Story") and it is controversial how Eyes Wide Shut itself is dream, the blue shadows frosting Harford room "backstage copy of Greenwich Village in New York that Kubrick built in England. Its major movement is an imaginative night-journey (even the parts of the days of it) by a man reeling from his wife's confession of infidelity tease fantasy, and to the end there is a symbolic gesture of the couple waking to reality and, perhaps a new maturity punished. But at some level - visually, psychologically, logically - every scene shimmers with unreality.'s all in the movie a dream? And if so, who is he to dream at some point, and why
Do not settle for easy answers. Odyssey Kubrick's final calls. And now the dream is yours. - Richard T. Jameson
Product Description
Movies of Stanley Kubrick's daring last is a psychosexual journey invigorating, exciting suspense story and a career milestone for Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Cruise to the doctor, who plunge into erotic foray, compromising their marriage - and can trap murhamysteerin - after his wife (Nicole Kidman) is discovered sexual desire. As the story sweeps from doubt and fear of self-discovery and reconciliation, Kubrick orchestrates with masterful flourishes. Graceful tracking shots, rich colors, startling images: Bravura features that make Kubrick a filmmaker here in forever to keep all eyes open.