EYES WIDE SHUT

It's largely accepted that Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" failed because Kubrick died just after making it, the studio failed to market it properly etc. when the real reason, of course, is that it's really a pretty terrible picture. It may be brilliantly filmed in that typically cool Kubrick style and it often looks stunning but it's about a preposterously overrated subject (sex) with a very dull scenario that drags on for over two and a half hours and has a monstrously egotistical performance from the horribly miscast Tom Cruise as the rich New York doctor consumed by jealousy after his wife, (Nicole Kidman), tells him of an infidelity she's committed, if only in her mind, (it's that sort of picture). They are awful people, in a film full of awful people, though to be fair Kidman, in much too small a role, is superb. She's an actress who can make even the tiniest line reading seem significant and who can make an unpleasant woman feel painfully human, abilities Cruise seems unable to muster.

Of course, on a purely technical level it's brilliant. Kubrick recreates New York in an English studio and his prowling camera moves through his gigantic set as sensuously as ever but it's also his poorest and least interesting film. The dialogue is clunky, the supporting cast are cyphers and the central set-piece, which seems to last for most of the picture but in fact only amounts to about twenty minutes of screen-time, is probably the least erotic orgy in movie history. It's all meant to be mysterious, exotic and highly dangerous though the fact that it's based on Arthur Schnitzler's novel "Traumnovelle", first published in 1925, and now transposed to contemporary New York, might explain why it doesn't gel. In the end it's so odd it makes what happens in "The Shining" seem perfectly natural. No Kubrick film is completely negligible and this one does have its fans but it's a very acquired taste; a case of a sow's ear wrapped in a silk purse. On the plus side, the masks in the orgy sequence look terrific.