Deception -- how we are deceived by others and how we deceive ourselves -- is the theme of "Eyes Wide Shut," a perplexing, chilling and often surprisingly comic movie that could only have come from the mind of the late Stanley Kubrick, a director who was always more interested in challenging his audience than in pandering to it.
Though it casts Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a well-to-do couple who've been married for nine years (which Cruise and Kidman in fact are), this is neither a love story nor a docudrama about the private lives of its stars. In fact, despite the advance hype, "Eyes" features surprisingly little carnal contact between the two. That would have been giving viewers something predictable; instead, "Eyes" confounds expectations again and again.
So much of the movie is about the everyday illusions we create and/or buy into that when its moments of truth arrive they're as bracing as if you'd stepped out of a steaming shower straight into a winter storm. The shocks go straight to the heart.
Set at Christmastime, a season in which presents and trees are dressed up to conceal what they really are, "Eyes" follows Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise) and his unemployed wife Alice (Kidman) through a couple of tumultuous days and nights. Though they live a seemingly comfortable life in a glorious apartment on New York's Central Park West, we can sense from the very first scene a storm is about to rattle their little paradise.
Bill and Alice have begun taking each other for granted -- instead of looking he blandly tells her "you always look beautiful" when she asks him what he thinks of her hair. At a party thrown by Bill's patient Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), a quietly troubled Alice pounds glasses of champagne and teases a Eurotrashy type into spending much of the evening on the dancefloor. Bill is almost picked up by a pair of striking young women who promise to show him "what's at the end of the rainbow."
Back at home, Alice ups the tension when she rolls a joint (she tellingly keeps her stash inside a Band-Aid cannister) and tries to knock down the invisible wall between them. What follows is a quirky corkscrew of a conversation about human nature that ends with a disturbing confession intended both to hurt and to haunt Bill, which it does.
It's a powerhouse of a scene, played to absolute perfection by Kidman, who has the smaller but far showier part in the story. Cruise, in contrast, is in practically every scene of the movie but more often as a low-key observer than as a participant. Though Bill is always around, he's not often accessible.
Loneliness is the other undercurrent running through "Eyes." Bill is forced to go off on his own to deal with his shattered ideals; a woman (Marie Richardson) sits desperately by herself at the bedside of her dead father; a hotel desk clerk (Alan Cumming) flirts with Bill in the hopes of getting something started; a pianist (Todd Field) talks about having left his family behind in Seattle.
Even when people do get together in Kubrick's sullen and dreary world, it's not a happy sight, since it almost always involves some sort of passionless, impersonal sex. A storeowner (Rade Sherbedgia) offers to rent out his young daughter (Leelee Sobieski) as if she were part of his inventory; a hooker (Vinessa Shaw) ropes in a client; costumed participants in an elaborate ritual pair up for silent, anonymous trysts. As Bill makes his way through New York, it becomes clear that while cheap thrills are everywhere, fulfillment is hard to find.
Doubtless many viewers will be left dissatisfied by "Eyes" as well. Like Martin Scorsese's "After Hours," another creepy and darkly funny tale of a solitary man adrift in the Big Apple, this is not a movie about likable, easily understood characters or conventional situations. Instead Kubrick and co-screenwriter Frederic Raphael (sp?) have designed "Eyes" as a tour of an emotionally barren Wonderland where people have chic-sounding names like Nightingale and Domino, where first impressions are almost always wrong and unpleasant realities are tucked away inside glittering facades. Anyone who knows Kubrick's work will tell you the man was not in the business of making crowd-pleasers, and "Eyes" is no exception to that rule. But regardless of how you feel about it immediately afterward, there's no denying the movie gets under the skin. In the same way a feverish one-night-stand can leave you feeling confused, angry and still strangely gratified, "Eyes" is a film with an impact that lingers long after its finale. James Sanford
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