Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

The Film Nobody Wanted

When Eyes Wide Shut came out in the summer of 1999, the marketing promised Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, then married and the most famous couple in the world, in an erotic thriller directed by Stanley Kubrick, who had died a few months earlier. People went expecting heat and scandal. What they got was a slow, strange, dreamlike film in which almost nothing sexual happens, and they felt cheated. The reviews were mixed, the audiences puzzled, and it was treated for years as a disappointing end to a great career.

I think they were watching the wrong film. Eyes Wide Shut isn’t about sex. It’s about the gap between what married people do and what they imagine, about jealousy and fear and the stories we tell ourselves to stay safe. It’s the truest film about marriage I know, and it’s hypnotic from its first scene to its last word. It has been reassessed steadily ever since, and it now sits comfortably among Kubrick’s best films. It asks for patience. It pays that patience back with interest.

The Confession

Bill Harford is a wealthy Manhattan doctor with a beautiful wife, a young daughter and a practice full of rich patients. After a Christmas party at the home of one of those patients, Alice, stoned and sitting on the bedroom floor, starts an argument about fidelity. Bill tells her, complacently, that women don’t think the way men do, and she laughs at him, a long, uncontrolled, contemptuous laugh that goes on until he’s visibly shaken.

Then she tells him a story. The previous summer, at a hotel in Cape Cod, she saw a naval officer across a dining room, and for one moment she would have given up everything, Bill, their daughter, her whole future, for one night with him. Nothing happened. She never spoke to the man. But the thought was real, and she has carried it with her ever since.

Nicole Kidman is extraordinary in this scene. It’s long, uncomfortable and completely convincing, and it sets the whole film in motion. Bill has just learned that his wife has an inner life he knew nothing about, and he doesn’t know what to do with the knowledge.

A Night That Never Quite Happens

Bill is called out to a patient’s home, where the man has just died, and walks out into the New York night with Alice’s story running in his head. What follows is a series of encounters, each one bringing him to the edge of infidelity and each one stopping short. The dead man’s daughter declares her love for him beside her father’s body. A young prostitute named Domino takes him to her apartment, and his wife calls on his mobile phone. A costume shop owner’s teenage daughter is offered to him by her own father.

None of it happens. Bill drifts through each encounter like a man in a dream, pulled forward by curiosity and resentment and pushed back by fear and habit. He never quite commits, and he never quite leaves. It’s a portrait of a man trying to prove something to himself and not knowing what it is.

The film’s genius is that the near misses are more disturbing than any affair would be. Bill discovers how close he is, all the time, to the edge of his own life, and how thin the walls of his respectability really are.

Somerton

Late that night, Bill meets an old medical school friend, Nick Nightingale, now a pianist, who tells him about a secret gathering he’s been hired to play at, blindfolded, somewhere outside the city. Bill gets the password, Fidelio, rents a costume and a mask from the shop, and takes a taxi to a mansion called Somerton.

Inside, a masked ritual is under way. Figures in cloaks and Venetian masks stand in a circle while a priest in red performs something like a liturgy, and Jocelyn Pook’s music, built from a reversed recording of an Orthodox chant, makes the whole sequence feel like church in hell. Then the ritual becomes an orgy, and Bill wanders through it, masked and uninvited, until a woman warns him to leave while he still can.

He’s discovered, brought before the gathering and ordered to remove his mask. The woman steps forward and offers to redeem him, to pay whatever price is demanded in his place. Bill is sent away with a warning never to speak of what he’s seen. The next day he learns that a woman has been found dead of an overdose.

Ziegler’s Explanation

Near the end of the film, Victor Ziegler, the rich patient whose party started it all, calls Bill to his house. Over a pool table, in one long scene, he explains everything. He was at Somerton. The whole thing was a charade staged to frighten Bill off. The woman who offered herself was a prostitute, the same one Bill had helped at the party, and she died of an overdose, as people in her line of work do. Nobody killed anybody. Bill should forget it.

Sydney Pollack is superb. Ziegler is warm, reasonable and completely menacing, a man who owns the world and explains it to you as a favor. You never know whether he’s telling the truth, and neither does Bill. The scene leaves you with two versions of events and no way to choose between them.

Pollack replaced Harvey Keitel, who had already shot the role, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in it now. The scene is the heart of the film’s last act, and it’s why the thriller elements refuse to resolve: some doors in this world are closed to Bill, and always will be.

Kubrick’s New York

Kubrick hadn’t left England in decades, so he built New York on soundstages at Pinewood and on streets in London, and the city looks slightly wrong on purpose. The streets repeat. Greenwich Village is too clean. The taxis and newsstands have the air of a set, and the effect is exactly what the film needs: a city that exists only at night, in a dream.

There’s also Christmas. Almost every scene has a tree or strings of colored lights in it, including rooms where there would be no reason for them. It gives the whole film a soft, glowing, slightly artificial quality, like a department store window, and it’s one of the details viewers keep noticing on second and third viewings.

The score adds to the dread. A single piano figure from Ligeti, two notes hammered over and over, plays at the most frightening moments, and it turns a masked man looking at Bill across a room into something unbearable.

The Longest Shoot

Kubrick shot the film for well over a year, one of the longest continuous shoots in history. Scenes were rehearsed and retaken dozens of times, sometimes far more, and the actors lived with the characters for so long that the performances have a strange, worn, dreamlike quality.

Two actors were lost along the way. Harvey Keitel played Ziegler and Jennifer Jason Leigh played the dead man’s daughter, and when their scenes needed reshooting, their schedules had run out. Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson replaced them. Kubrick delivered his final cut to Warner Bros in early March 1999 and died six days later.

For the American release, the studio digitally inserted cloaked figures in front of some of the explicit moments at Somerton to secure an R rating. The uncut version is now easy to find. It’s the one to watch.

Cruise and Kidman

Cruise and Kidman were married during the shoot, and the film uses that. Every scene between them carries the weight of real intimacy and real distance, and audiences at the time couldn’t stop reading it as a document of their marriage. They separated two years later.

Whatever you make of the gossip, the performances stand on their own. Cruise is stiff, lost and frightened, a man whose confidence has been punctured and who keeps trying to prove something he can’t name. It’s the least heroic role he has ever taken, and one of his best. Kidman has less screen time and makes every minute count, sharp, dangerous and completely unafraid of her husband’s discomfort.

Schnitzler’s Dream

The source is Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, or Dream Story, set among the doctors and courtesans of Vienna. Kubrick had wanted to film it for decades, and he and Frederic Raphael kept its shape almost exactly: a confession, a night of temptation, a masked gathering and a return home.

Moving it to modern New York made it stranger, not more modern. The characters talk like people in a dream, repeating each other’s words back to them as questions, and the city behaves like a place that only exists at night. Kubrick took the title literally. Everything in the film has the logic of a dream, and nothing is quite what it appears.

The Last Word

The film ends in a toy shop at Christmas. Bill has confessed everything to Alice, sobbing, and the two of them walk through the aisles while their daughter wanders ahead, picking out presents. Alice says they should be grateful they’ve come through it, whether it was real or a dream. Then she tells Bill what she thinks they need to do next, in one very blunt word.

It’s the last word of Kubrick’s last film. It’s perfect. Not an answer and not a resolution, but a decision to keep going, together, with their eyes open. After two and a half hours of dread, it’s funny, frank and oddly hopeful.

What Eyes Wide Shut Gets Right

Because it does something no other film I know has managed. It takes the fear at the center of a marriage, the fear that the person beside you has thoughts you’ll never reach, and turns it into a whole world. It’s slow, strange and beautiful, and every scene is precisely controlled. It gets better on every viewing, because once you stop waiting for a thriller, you start to see the patterns: the repeated phrases, the colors, the way every woman Bill meets echoes the one before.

It was Kubrick’s last film, and it may be his most personal. Go in expecting a film about a marriage, not a thriller, and give it the patience it asks for.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Eyes Wide Shut

It’s better than people said at the time, and I rate it a 10. Go in expecting a film about a marriage, give it your full attention and the patience it asks for, and watch the uncut version. It pays that patience back.

Frequently Asked Questions