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During a recent message board rant bemoaning the fact that the state of modern criticism (not any specific form, just criticism in general) sucks, I decided that I should put Eyes Wide Shut to the tacks fairly, since so few seem to have done so.  I’m not saying that no one has done so, but in light of the recent Kubrick HD releases, it’s far too apparent that people have generally taken the shitty criticism from the time of EWS’s release to heart permanently.

Before I get to the meat, I think it is important to note that most Kubrick movies have not been huge successes at the theatres, and only a relatively tiny subset of them won any sort of unanimous acclaim from the critics.  His early films, before he was king, seem to have done well critically, but when he got big, he was apparently either very divisive, or an easy target for bitter critics to try and earn themselves a name with via negative reviews.  I am going to assume the former, that Kubrick’s movies are divisive, because that more logically follows than assuming that critics have been bitter for the last, oh, 30 some years.  2001?  It was a hit, but not a critical success at the time of release.  A Clockwork Orange? Divisive to critics of the time, possibly due to the scandalous content.  Barry Lyndon?  Actually did decently critically, though by no means unanimous; however, it was a flop.  The Shining? Like 2001, a critical wash-up, but a commercial success.  Full Metal Jacket?  Well, this fared better critically than most of his movies; oddly enough, it’s bar none his worst movie, so I’m counting this as a hit by my math.

So looking at the pattern, my case is pretty cut and dry before I even get to talking about the movie:  the criticism is mixed, so it must be fantastic, right?  Well, that is right, but of course it is–I said it, and I am very smart and I listen to classical music.

It’s not beyond criticism, but I firmly believe that not only is this movie great, but it is among Kubrick’s very best.  The movie had a lot of hype coming out, fueled by prominent magazine covers, and then, probably the kiss of death for the movie critically, Kubrick’s death.  You see, Kubrick’s death, at the time, could be seen as poetic.  Just dying days after delivering his cut of the movie!  The film just had to be a punctuation to his life and career, and what a Romantic notion it is to believe that his last movie was going right over the grandstand!  And then the movie came out, and the critics had their eyes on the sky, looking for the grand slam, missing completely the swift double Kubrick knocked, unnoticed, between their legs.

Maybe critics missed the settings, or the genres.  You can’t really give EWS a one or two word genre.  It’s not a war movie, a horror flick, a period piece, or science fiction.  It’s not an overt satire like Strangelove, nor a weird comedy like Lolita.  It’s not really a thriller.  It’s a sort of mystery.  It’s vaguely Hitchcockian.  The one thing it definitely is, from beginning to end, is Kubrick.  There is no way you could mistake this movie for another director’s film.  From the impeccable soundtrack to the bathroom shots to the car tracking shots to the lack of dialogue, its genre, is Kubrick.

Kubrick liked to work with big themes.  Eyes Wide Shut is no different, but it doesn’t appear to be making fairly clear (but still interpretive) statements like Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, or Full Metal Jacket.  As far as meaning goes, I think it is like 2001 in meaning.  It gives you the big themes, like trust and fidelity, and it gives you a scenario, a meditation on said theme, and while everything, or most of the things, in the respective pictures seem to say something about those themes, what they actually say is left for the viewer to define and interpret themself.  You can ask ten different people to give an interpretation of 2001 and probably come up with as many different meanings.  Eyes Wide Shut is no different; I believe that it is as interpretable as 2001.

Ebert called A Clockwork Orange an ideological mess when it was first released.  I find that incredibly strange since ACO is fairly cut and dry when it comes to meaning.  If any of Kubrick’s movies can be called ideological messes, they’re 2001 and EWS.  But still, the mess label is not quite correct; both movies throw ideas related to their individual themes at you at an alarming rate, too fast to give enough time to on just one viewing, but they are intended (I believe) to stimulate thought about their stated themes, not say anything definitive like ACO and Strangelove.EWS gives us a theme of fidelity and trust.  Although those two words can be considered synonyms, there is a slight difference here.  Fidelity, as in marital or sexual fidelity, and trust, as in the trust of friendship.  Several other themes can be picked up, going into things as vague as truth and reality (much effort is put into creating a dreamlike atmosphere, and the reality of how certain events happen is sometimes, at best, obscured), but I don’t think many would disagree that the movie is mainly about fidelity and trust.

For fidelity, we have Tom and Nicole.  To put things bluntly, the events of the movie largely occur because, well, Tom Cruise is trying to cheat on his wife because she once contemplated having an affair.  Tom is tempted several times, once by a grieving woman, once by a hooker on the streets, at the weird notorious orgy, and finally by the earlier hooker’s roommate.  Each time he is interrupted before he can make his move.  At the end of the movie, he tells his wife everything that’s happened, sort of completing the “trust loop” that she began by telling him of her near infidelity.  This is oversimplifying a few things, but that’s the unbent truth of the events. For trust, we have Tom and Sydney Pollack, playing his friend Ziegler.  I only ever hear people talk about this movie being about sex and fidelity, so I don’t think many even look beyond that, but there’s a fairly significant arc between Tom and Pollack.  To the credit of other observers, I have developed this theme after several viewings, and after a fairly careful analysis of most of the scenes Sydney Pollack is in.  Bear with me a bit, because I have to lay a bit of groundwork before I get to the payoff.Tom and Pollack are friends.  At the beginning of the movie, Nicole makes a comment asking why Pollack invites the couple to his Christmas Party every year (it is clearly an upper echelon of society event), and Tom replies that it’s because he makes house calls.  Later on, when Tom privately helps an ODed attendee in Pollack’s private quarters, it becomes apparent what those “house calls” could have been.  Although we have no idea how Tom and Pollack became acquaintances in the movie (Pollack’s character is significantly older than Cruise’s), they have enough of a rapport that there is significant trust.  Pollack knows that Cruise will keep mum about his potential legal snafus, Cruise knows that he gets an invitation to a swank party (and other benefits, like lots of 25 year old scotch [very pricey!]).  Skipping the events of the masked ball (see the end of this post for a link to another page with my careful analysis of the ball), Pollack at the end of the movie tells Tom the truth; just like how Tom completes the the “trust loop” with Nicole, here Pollack seals the “trust loop” (opened when Tom rescued the ODed patron) with Tom by revealing the truth of what happened at the ball, exactly.Of course, the Pollack thing is a sort of sub-story of the main fidelity thing, but oddly enough it is more complicated to decipher, since it involves understanding exactly the events of the masked ball, which is unlikely to happen on a person’s first viewing, since they will be, uh, distracted by the scene.