New Yorker - July 26, 1999

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This is perhaps not quite the epitaph that he would have wished - nor is it the one that I would have wished to write - but I can state unequivocally that the late Stanley Kubrick, in his final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," has staged the most pompous orgy in the history of the movies. Perhaps the most pompous in the history of real-life orgies, too - though, not having been to one in two or three weeks, I'm a little less sure of my ground there. The orgy is set in a Gothic-style mansion on Long Island, a gruesome crypt of endless corridors and vast rooms with overhanging balconies. A pipe organ, accompanied by weird chanting, gives off a prolonged, solemn wail; a man in cardinal's robes pounds a stick on the floor, just like the manager of a French theatre at the beginning of a play. Men in black cloaks and grotesque masks stand silently next to tall women with long legs, full buttocks, and perfect round breasts; the women wear masks, too, but they are naked except for G-strings and high heels. We seem to be at a cocktail party arranged for fashion models by impotent editors. Did they all show up to enjoy the chanting and organ music? No, fornication ensues, though in the American version of "Eyes Wide Shut" your view of the action will be blocked by digitalized figures that have been added to secure an R rather than an NC-17 rating for the movie. Even, however, if you let your imagination run wild, the atmosphere - sombre, trancelike, unimpassioned - should hold you in check. The orgy is frozen in ritual, and devoted not to pleasure but to authority and fear. It's a stately Stanley orgy - an analogue of the perversely unaristocratic goings on in Kubrick's beautifully photographed, alienated spectacle "Barry Lyndon," from 1975.

Tom Cruise atttends the event. He plays Bill Harford, some sort of Manhattan doctor who caters to the rich, and he's drawn to the mansion at the end of a long night of wandering through New York - a journey that was set off when his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), confessed to her sexual interest in a naval officer she had spotted the previous summer during a vacation with Bill. Nothing happened but an exchange of glances, yet Kidman, who has a small, libidinous mouth, a long waist, and alabaster flesh (she's a paler version of the anonymous women at the orgy), recites it to Cruise with antagonistic relish, and the nasy feeling behind her story is the most vivid emotion in the movie. Why is she nasty? Because she wants to make Bill jealous. Still, as Bill broods on the confession, and replays, in his head, the image of the naval officer and Alice making love, we may wonder whether Kubrick and his co-scenarist, Frederic Raphael, were right to make her story the mainspring of the entire film. Is Alice's expression of desire enough to send a contemporary marriage spinning out of control?

"Eyes Wide Shut" is based on a superb Arthur Schnitzler work from 1926, "Traumnovelle," which has been translated in different American editions as "Rhapsody" and "Dream Story." Writing in Vienna in the mid-twenties, Schnitzler may have sensed that his material, in terms of consciousness of sex, was already dated, so he set the book earlier, before the First World War, at the time of horse-drawn carriages and proper, repressed bourgeois couples - and also at the time of Freud's revolutionary writings about dreams and desire, and the emergence of a new, "decadent" style of Viennese painting (Klimt and Schiele), in which women's erotic appetites were represented as enthrallingly dangerous. In Schnitzler's tale, the wife's recitation reveals the drives churning beneath the surface of the marriage, and it smashes the couple's bourgeois complacency. Disturbed and aroused, the husband enters an ambiguously eroticized dream landscape - strange women approach him, perverse things happen, and he perilously faces liberation and destruction at the same time.

The movie follows the same scheme, but when the plot events get pulled out of Schnitzler's fantasia of prewar Vienna they lose their emotional and erotic meaning. Would a husband be quite so unhinged in 1999, a time when conscious sexual fantasy is omnipresent, filling half the magazines on the newsstand? Cruise's Bill Harford wanders around New York in a daze, unsure of what he wants. Is it revenge on his wife? We can't tell. Are we supposed to root for him to get laid? Or hope that he will behave himself and go home? Kubrick and Raphael haven't developed the relationship between this couple well enough for us to see what's at stake. And they've neutered the emotions that might have pulled the movie together. Bill is so nonplussed by the sexually aggressive women he encounters that he seems like a prig, and, when he neither walks away nor participates, he turns into a mere confused voyeur. He's a protagonist without a purpose, wandering through an indistinct Kubrickian landscape in which everything seems wrong. Would a wealthy young doctor make house calls - in New York, in the nineties? Bill and Alice go to a party at a Manhattan house so vast that the affair seems like a reception at the embassy. Or is the setting meant to suggest a public building in late-imperial Vienna, Schnitzler's period? The New York streets at night are bizarrely devoid of life; a prostitute who picks up Bill and takes him home is patently too beautiful and well educated to be working the pavements. And so on: Stanley Kubrick, having lived in the English countryside for years, produces expository details that fail to connect to American life as anyone lives it, so when the movie becomes intentionally dreamlike we experience no special violation of the normal - the normal is vaguely and dispiritedly "off" from the beginning. "Eyes Wide Shut" never gets a firm purchase on dream or reality.

In Schnitzler's novel, the orgy is a shadowy affair, and we take it as a projection of the husband's desires and fears. When one of the masked naked women tells him that he is in danger, she could be a portent from his subconscious - a warning, perhaps, that he could destroy his marriage. But in the movie the woman who offers warning is presented as an actual person, who had shown up earlier, naked again, at the party attended by Bill and Alice; she has a marginal relation to Bill, but we never figure out why she warns him at the orgy and even (apparently) sacrifices her life to get him to leave. By replacing a figure out of the unconscious with a literal woman, Kubrick and Raphael stupidly create a mystery that they are forced to explain. And the explanation is hapless: the woman vanishes, and the filmmakers' sudden disposal of her seems contemptuous, as if they cared for this anonymous naked beauty no more than did the masked and robed male figures. Who are the members of this dim hellfire club, anyway? Bill is told that if he only knew who was behind the masks he would lose sleep. Apparently, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been frolicking in Long Island mansions. Really, Kubrick and Raphael should have been ashamed to engage in this kind of portentous mystification, though I suppose we can be grateful that the movie reveals at last Kubrick's secret desire - to preside over arcane, cruel rituals at Versailles.

No doubt some will say that all this confusion - the mixture of unconscious and literal, of American and European - is part of a plan, one element of a completely controlled style. After all, Kubrick's signature is visible in every shot. The camera glides smoothly from room to room; the colors are Kubrick's beloved amber and ochre; and the scenes play, as they often do in his late work, deliberately, very deliberately, not just in ambiguous moments but when characters are doing the most ordinary things, like dressing for dinner. The movie, filled with suggestive dead air, couldn't be further from the rushed, jangled commercial products of the summer season. But "Eyes Wide Shut" doesn't have the coherence or power of art, either, and I found myself bored, and more than eager for a director with a feeling for the lyricism of obsession - Bergman, say - to come in and take over. The actors may have needed a different director, too. Kidman has a few charged, provocative moments, but she drops out of the long middle of the movie, and her on-screen sex with her husband - the big selling point we've been hearing about for the last two years - consists of little more than a few naked embraces. As for Tom Cruise, he meets a strange fate in "Eyes Wide Shut." In "Jerry Maguire," as a hyperactive sports agent, Cruise created a whole new physical language for himself. He was free and easy, and flew through his scenes, delivering on the promise of his wild dance in "Risky Business" (1983). But Kubrick has imprisoned him in the role of a bourgeois stiff, and mostly Cruise furrows his brow and rolls his eyes. Now that he's in a sex movie again, he winds up using his body less than he ever has before.

"The Blair Witch Project" is the creation of persons who will doubtless be known in movie history as "the five guys from Orlando" - young film nuts, led by Eduardo Sanchez, Dan Myrick, and Gregg Hale, who have crafted the "remnants" with skill and cunning. For, of course, the film project is a fiction; the entire movie, with its documentary apparatus, its witch mythology, and so on, is fiction. The Orlando Five are deep into cultishness - they've devised a movie that will play at midnight on every campus in the country - but their picture delivers rich, pleasurable doses of fear in a way that not even the cleverest horror movies do. As much as the pathetic film crew, the audience is invaded by terror of the unknown, and the lunging technique only increases our dread of what lies just beyond the camera's ability to record. What's out there? "The Blair Witch Project" is a rough masterpiece of suggestion, and it touches on something serious - filmmaking as passion, filmmaking as obsession unto death. It's a drive that Stanley Kubrick would have understood better than anyone.