Now that Tom Cruise is again in the gossip columns—expounding the many virtues of his much younger girlfriend and of his beloved super-cult, doling out advice about vitamins to Brooke Shields and voluble disquisitions about the evils of psychoanalysis—it’s a pleasure to return to Kubrick’s last film to see him taken down a peg or two. Or four. The perpetual “Sexiest Man Alive” begins the film as a cocksure doctor-to-the-rich and ends it as a blubbering (and short!) mass of jelly. The many scourges of WASPy heteronormativity—cuckoldry, homosexuality, AIDS, social ostracism—beseige Cruise’s character in darkly comic succession, while Kidman’s character stalks imperiously in the background. Deploying some well-timed breakdowns and revelations, Kidman heightens her real and fictive husband’s insecurities.
Still, a full six years after its release, the film utterly confounds me. A slow pace, repetitions of dialogue, and very peculiar acting (marked here by Cruise’s loud, persistent nose-breathing) are nothing new in Kubrick’s films, but here they all seem to rest on the most evanescent of bases. Nothing in the film—not even the nightvisions of Kidman having sex with a Naval officer—can be firmly identified as entirely real or fantastic, and the result is a full experience (both funny and frightening) of Freud’s idea of the uncanny.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Warner Bros. DVD
02 Jun 2005 12:37 PM | Comments (5)
Ooh, I was just thinking how I need to watch this again soon. Such a perfect final line for Kidman, too.
Love Kubrick though I may, I cannot get my head around this one. The pace is slow—somnolent, one might say—but that doesn’t bother me. Perhaps the inert talents of his two stars just doesn’t seem right to me.
I don’t buy them as a socializing, vapid, chic couple-about-town. Heck, I don’t even buy them as a couple. There’s the ol’ Kubrick mise-en-scene to keep me going: a stately chase around “Manhattan” … a prowling tour through the orgy house … etc.
The humor creeps in, too: the scene in the costume shop is hilarious, once you give in to its illogic. I think we tend to forget that Kubrick has been funny since Strangelove (“2001” notwithstanding), and the humor has been more subversive and difficult. How many of us can’t decide if The Shining is farce or fantasy?
My thoughts scatter. I am tired.
How many of us can’t decide if The Shining is farce or fantasy?
A bit of a cop out, but I’d say it was both: The Shining is fantasy; Jack Nicholson in The Shining is farcical, but brilliantly so.
i agree with the “humor” comment above—in fact I’d argue that most of Kubrick’s films are meant to be (at least on some level) funny. the overall darkness (tone and photography) of eyes wide shut might obscure the satire. but the more i see it, the funnier it becomes. same with barry lyndon, actually. that movie is hilarious! is it just me? hi leo!
Barry Lyndon is hilarious. I didn’t feel the humor was as evident in Eyes Wide Shut. It also happens that Kubrick’s most “normal” comedy, Dr. Strangelove, is my least favorite his (after A Clockwork Orange that is. Yuck).
matt
2 June 2005
3:15 PM
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