Word: kubrick
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That something is Cruise and Kidman. Kubrick was usually star shy, preferring ensemble casts of solid players to huge names. But when Terry Semel, who runs Warner Bros. in tandem with Robert Daly, gave the project its green light, he said, "What I would really love you to consider is a movie star in the lead role; you haven't done that since Jack Nicholson [in The Shining]." Kubrick was concerned that a movie star wouldn't share his tireless work ethic. Nevertheless, the Cruises were approached...
...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...
...Kubrick was used to that danger, even appeared to revel in it. Most of his pictures, whatever their genre roots, disappointed genre expectations, not to mention critical anticipation and occasionally the studio's box-office ambitions. As Eyes Wide Shut seeks to avoid those perils, it has something besides its considerable intrinsic merits going...