"From the very beginning, all of my films have divided the critics. Some have thought them wonderful, and others have found very little good to say. But subsequent critical opinion has always resulted in a very remarkable shift to the favorable." ~ Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick had proved himself more than capable of subverting expectations when it came to the public and it appeared the critics never played any part in his calculations at all – more than any other mainstream director, with every film project, Stanley Kubrick set out to please himself. He was in this happy place that he could indulge himself because of the enormous regard in which he was held and because of the enormous profits his films, albeit few and far between in recent years, continued to make. In the nearly two decades after The Shining in 1980 Kubrick had made only one film, Full Metal Jacket, so the 12-year gap had audiences keen to see what the master had in store.  

Doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) are off to a Xmas party in New York thrown by Victor (Sydney Pollack), a wealthy and socially well-connected patient of Bill’s. Alice gets drunk and flirts with an older European man and Bill gets dragged into helping Victor deal with a sexual tryst gone wrong involving Victor and a younger naked woman who’d taken an overdose. Bill helps out and when the couple return home, some jealousies are revealed and an argument ensues. Bill is called out to visit the home of an elderly patient who died and afterwards wanders through Greenwich Village alone, with visions of Alice’s admitted erotic fixation on a naval officer running through his mind – he sees a prostitute then goes to a club where Nick (Todd Field), an old friend of his is playing piano. He hears from Nick about a secret sex party and decides to crash it. It does not work out the way he thought it would.  

Stanley Kubrick had a self-admitted fascination with pornography on film and had told colleagues he wanted to be the first mainstream director to feature explicit sex acts in a feature, goaded into it by his friend Terry Southern. He had wanted to adapt the source material from 1926 (Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler) ever since the late 1960s, a period when a new sexual permissiveness had penetrated pop culture, and writers like Terry Southern were all the rage. Southern had helped Kubrick with Dr. Strangelove and continued to pester Stanley about the porn film possibilities, but Kubrick’s wife threatened to never speak to him again, so Kubrick limped out. Southern took the idea and wrote the novel Blue Movie about a fictional director making a mainstream porn film – that's fictional with an S.K. Southern died in 1995, about the time Kubrick put Eyes Wide Shut into focus by casting Tom and Nicole. If Stanley didn’t put actual penetrative sex on film, he got as close as he could with Eyes Wide Shut. 

Kubrick employed the talented writer Frederic Raphael to help him adapt the novella, and the pair updated the location and period and settled on a subtle satire approach rather than the broad humour that Kubrick originally envisaged - at various iterations Kubrick had wanted to cast Steve Martin, Woody Allen, Bill Murray and Albert Brooks! The resultant film became more of an erotic thriller than a mediation on the different sexual drivers between men and women as understood by an early 20th century text full of recent Freudian theory, then in its first flush - so to speak. Instead, Kubrick dials in Kafkaesque elements as he skewers middle-class male fantasies and notions of sexual control in a roiling stew of intensity, introspection and uncertainty. If Kubrick’s tongue is not firmly in his cheeks, he at least recognises its uses are not restricted to purely linguistic skills.  

Kubrick’s trademark visual elegance and clarity, as well as his absolute meticulous mastery of mise en scene are in evidence in every frame, but the visuals are underlining what is at the heart of the film – a man in existential crisis. Bill is a successful New York doctor, but his wealth and social cache is a fraction of Victor’s and Bill seems to envy and admire Victor in equal measure, as shown by his deference to Victor during the overdose sequence. Once his sexual insecurities reveal themselves after Alice’s admission of her dream fantasy, Bill struggles to reconcile his real life with the larger, more glamourous world he seems to be locked out of until Nick accidently offers him an entry point. It is here where Bill’s ambition and frustrations collide, where he can shed the burden of being the goody-goody, upright society doctor and cross the line into sexual transgressive – something he seems to assume is deservedly available to him in his privileged, entitled, upper class, white man world. 

Kubrick mostly avoided using the big stars of the day to front his films – the exceptions being Spartacus (where he was a hired gun to Kirk Douglas) and The Shining, where Jack Nicholson was one of the biggest stars in the world, but here he hired the premiere movie star couple du jour, Tom and Nicole. Cruise had walked a career tightrope of attaching himself to blockbuster popcorn movies like Top Gun and more challenging roles in dramas like Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, but undoubtedly viewed working with Kubrick as an artistic statement. As with many movie stars who aspire to be seen as great actors, the roles that are a natural fit return the greatest artistic results and so it was here – Cruise was a natural fit for the character of a successful, professional young man of privilege who struggles to imagine his beautiful wife could lust after another man. Kidman was not quite as caught between commerce and art as Cruise at that point in her career and she is superb as the questioning wife who wonders at the small humiliations her husband is willing to make in the cause of climbing the social ladder. 

For all their combined lustre and star power, the film is (of course) only Kubrick's in a way only Kubrick could conjure. The look of the film, the pacing, the lighting, the performances and the perversions all play as point and counterpoint in the master’s symphony. It may surprise to discover that the film was entirely shot in England as Kubrick refused to fly - it's a confected New York of his imagination, just as illusory as the fantasy world Bill is chasing. Kubrick dangles the lure of a secret world that exists just out of touching distance from Bill, but then teases that the ‘conspiracy theory’ level explanations – that he was being followed by the dark forces that controlled the orgy - that the overdose girl was sacrificed by the sex cult and that she was the body he saw in the morgue – that Nick was kidnapped and killed by thugs to keep him quiet – all serve to keep Bill in a state of disconnection between his own life and the fantasy world he is denied. Kubrick sums it all up with Alice’s pithy and succinct one word reply to Bill in the Xmas toy store, surrounded by children and the lights and baubles of the season of joy he seems to be saying – enjoy what you do have and stop fretting about what you don’t have, schmuck.   

Stanley Kubrick sent Tom and Nicole a cut of the film and they loved it. Stanley Kubrick died one week later. 

It was a rare thing in serious cinema that a director had so much control over every aspect of filmmaking to the extent he could please himself and not be a slave to studio money men, but Kubrick was that unicorn. Eyes Wide Shut was much misunderstood and unfairly maligned at the time of its release – compromised in the wake of Kubrick’s sudden death and the notoriety around Kidman’s nudity and sex scenes - anybody remember Godard and Bardot doing the same thing? From the distance afforded by half a century the film is confident in tone and striking at every level – the music score is on point and the cinematography from Larry Smith is rich and atmospheric. The film is also wittier and arch in ways that were overlooked - not the comedy Kubrick once envisaged, but wry and supple and ironic to balance the mood of lingering dread and underlying corruption – and is a long set up to the punchline Kidman delivers at the end. Maybe Stanley had the last laugh?