Word: kubrick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Kubrick's widow Christiane remembers his asking her to read the book as far back as 1968, when he was looking for something to follow 2001. She also remembers not caring greatly for it at the time, probably because she had become "allergic to psychiatric conversations." But Kubrick, she recalls, took the passion of their arguments about the "dream story" as evidence that material so stirring must be worth doing. In any case, using Jay Cocks, then a young film reporter for TIME, as a front, on the grounds that Cocks might acquire rights to the book more cheaply than...
...care for. His wife Alice would have been easy to play either ditsy or bitchy. But there is in Cruise a kind of passionate watchfulness and in Kidman a desperate and touching candor, and they keep drawing us past the narrative's improbabilities to its human heart. As for Kubrick, he is typically unsentimental and tough-minded, but his tracking shots are as unselfconscious as ever, gracefully enfolding us in his story...
...Kubrick needed to be at his best, for the story turns on a very thin dime. The night after a grand party, at which both husband and wife indulge in potentially dangerous flirtations, she taunts him about his relationships with his female patients and insists on burdening him with a tale of an encounter she had at a seaside resort, where she and a young naval officer eyed each other erotically. Nothing more than that happened, but she tells her husband, in language that is almost identical in novel and screenplay, "Had he called me--I thought--I could...
Cruise's William accepts this dubious reassurance but is haunted by powerfully lubricious visions of his wife making love to the officer as he goes about his night-time rounds in modern New York City, which Kubrick has substituted for Schnitzler's fin-de-siecle Vienna. The possibilities of relief--or should we call it revenge?--are everywhere: a newly dead patient's daughter comes on to William powerfully yet pathetically; a cheerful prostitute invites him to a casual coupling; and, finally, in the movie's central sequence, he succeeds in invading a secret orgy, where masked couples disport themselves...
...orgy sequence, along with several others in the film, is full of naked (and mainly handsome) flesh. But as Christiane Kubrick says, "It has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with fear," and although this is the point Kubrick very obviously wanted to make, it may not be a point audiences want to take. Indeed, the deepest daring of Eyes Wide Shut lies in the way it keeps edging viewers toward a place they want very much to go (famous people making out before the camera, for example), then dashing those hopes. It is also a movie...