AT THE MOVIES

Stanley Is The Center of Gravity In The Last Kubrick Picture Show

David Chute

Mirror contributing writer

   Stanley Kubrick's final opus, "Eyes Wide Shut," feels like the most expensive Radley Metzger movie ever made, "The Lickerish Quartet" with Zeis lenses and big stars. Attempting to chart the vertiginous drift of a ritzy New York doctor (Tom Cruise) and his wife (Nicole Kidman) toward the moral Dark Side, the movie fascinates as long as it long as it remains murky and suggestive. But it founders instantly when Kubrick tries to get down to brass tacks, sexually speaking. After almost 90 grinding and deliberate minutes of painstaking preparation he finally unveils his voyeuristic peek into the carnal abyss—and what we get is a bunch of randy old men dressed up in floor-length robes and carnival masks, staging solemn Druidic sex rituals in a gilded mansion, gazing at staged tableaux that look like animatronic reenactments of Porno's Greatest Hits. Yes, sex is a tricky subject. One person's turn on is another's thigh slapper. But the gap between the risqué and the risible in "Eyes Wide Shut" isn't a matter of nuances or gradations. The gap between intention and execution here is flabbergasting, especially in a major work by an admired artist.
   Up to that point, when Cruise's character, Dr. Bill Hartford, dons a disguise and infiltrates a top secret private orgy, the movie actually seems to be on to something interesting, an original assessment of the internal contradictions of modern marriage. The Cruise and Kidman characters, the Hartfords, Bill and Alice, seem to be fond of each other and comfortable together physically. And they are both so beautiful that a glossy Park Avenue party thrown by one of Dr. Bill's rich patients (Sydney Pollack) becomes a veritable minefield of come-hither glances and indecent propositions—and the preening lovebirds relish every minute of it.
   It is immediately obvious to us, if not to them, that the Hartfords are playing a dangerous game. They encourage the sexual overtures of strangers, because it strokes their vanity, and then coolly drift away. They are dabbling their fingers in the flames, toying with temptation, using it as an aphrodisiac. When they get home later they're all worked up and ready to go. They strip and embrace—but as they come together Alice looks teasingly away to study their entwined bodies reflected in a mirror. The ambiguities of that narcissistic sidelong glance are intriguing, at least until we realize that Kubrick has no intention of pursuing them. The Hartfords seem to be voyeuristically remote even from their own happiness. They may love the idea of themselves as a gorgeous couple even more than they love each other, moving through their own lives like rapt spectators at another kind of a steamy party, a sex game for two players.
   The bond of trust uniting this couple is so wispy that it can be shredded by a single forthright conversation. And clueless Bill has only himself to blame. He provokes Alice by flatly declaring that he has never even been tempted to pass from flirting to fornication—mostly, he implies, because he knows that she never would never stray, and he couldn't bear to violate her confidence. Kidman gives the movie's best performance, and she pulls out all the stops here, as Alice responds by confessing that, as a matter of fact, she did almost cheat once; that she was prevented from doing so only by the awkward circumstances. Cruise's stunned response is devastating. The earth seems to drop away beneath his feet. Haunted by a lurid black & white mental image of the incident Alice has described, Dr. Bill hails a cab and goes trolling for a sex fantasy to call his own. But when he finds it, and it turns out to be a drive-in retro-porno parody, the balloon deflates with a flatulent hiss.
   The Show World tone isn't confined to the orgy episode, in which (it could be argued) it more or less makes sense. The whole movie unfolds in a Never-Never Land of dirty mindedness. The patients that Dr. Hartford examines at work also look like Penthouse Pets, and even the minor supporting characters (a gay desk clerk in a hotel, a bereaved daughter in her father's death chamber) only have one thing on their minds. There's an episode of "Friends" in which the guys are accidentally wired to the porno channel by their cable company. After several days of non-stop ogling they venture out into the real world and then compare notes: "Something's wrong: a meter maid gave me a ticket today and she didn't want to have sex with me!" All the characters in "Eyes Wide Shut" seem to have been watching too much free porn. Or more likely the director was. The orgy sequence is only a crystallization of the atmosphere of the entire movie, and its puerility gives the game away. These garish sex fantasies should be ascribed not to the dirty old characters but to the auteur who created them, Dirty Old Stanley Kubrick.
In his last few pictures, Kubrick became a rigid mannerist, famous for shooting 50 takes of a scene to make sure that not a single hair on anybody's head was out of place. His obsessive-compulsive aesthetic is so distinctive that you can identify his work instantly, from just about any shot chosen at random: The washed-out over lit interiors, like tiled operating rooms, the oily Steadicam following shots, the invariable slightly distorted focal length. Rather than enter into the spirit of each new project, Kubrick glommed onto one promising source novel after another and Stanley-ized them to an impenetrable high gloss. Even his repertoire of favorite shots became repetitive. Nicole Kidman's bare flanks drift past the camera in "Eyes Wide Shut" like one of the space modules in "2001," in orbit around Jupiter. The true center of gravity in a Kubrick film is always Stanley. It isn't the world that matters but his distinctive way of seeing it. The distortion of reality isn't particularly revealing, either, it's more like a symptom of exhaustion. The hard-edged images suggest the filtering effect of some nagging clinical condition, like the stab of fluorescent light fixtures into tender eyeballs after pulling an all-nighter.
   Kubrick's source novel for "Eyes Wide Shut" was a 1926 work, "Traumnovelle" ("Dream Story"), by the Viennese modernist Arthur Schnitzler. The writer's conceit of a middle class couple shocked out of their complacency by a night journey into a symbolist dream world hasn't been rethought in terms of modern people living in a modern city—much less in Manhattan. I wasn't convinced for a second that these were dreams a well-to-do New York doctor and his chic wife would ever actually dredge up—or that even if they did they couldn't just dismiss them with a few pop-psych platitudes. Musty surreal-Freudian terrors have been grafted whole onto their worldly modern characters. But then, Kubrick's New York is visibly a soundstage simulacrum, anyway, erected on a back lot in England and augmented with some second unit shots of cabs cruising Greenwich Village. The movie doesn't unfold in any recognizable setting. As a friend put it, we are stranded in darkest Stanleyland. An ex-pat recluse who in his last years rarely left his house in rural England, Kubrick had never before seemed as out of touch with the moods and textures of his homeland as he does here—not even when he tried to pass off the British countryside as the American Midwest in "Lolita."
   Perhaps it goes without saying that if the people and their feelings in a movie never touch us, their moral turmoil won't either, no matter how much heavy lifting (and grunting and panting) is done in other areas. These character are almost totally opaque. Bill may be the one who goes out looking for kicks, but Alice's dreams are pretty vivid, too, especially when they are replayed in his imagination. And as he observes (quoting Schnitzler?), "No dream is just a dream." Again and again in "Eyes Wide Shut" Bill is pulled back from the brink only because the phone rings at the right (or wrong) moment, or his lack of bona fides at the orgy is discovered just as things are starting to heat up. He lucks outs. Like Alice in the story she tells him, the one that gets the ball rolling, Bill repeatedly comes this close. It's no wonder he's freaked out, as much as anything by the weakness of his self-control. It makes sense that a seemingly happy couple, facing up to the fact that their bond is more fragile than they ever realized, could be scared witless and forced into a painful re-assessment. They might even come out stronger for it. This is suggested in the move's tentative closing scenes, in which Alice comforts her frazzled husband by insisting, "We're awake now."
   This story could certainly be made to work in a contemporary setting. It might even work better, because all our vows now are fragile and pro forma. There is no contract, we often hear, that cannot be re-negotiated, no moral gold standard to guarantee our earnest promissory notes. If only inertia is holding people together it can be chillingly easy for them to forget themselves and each other and just…drift off. The great Swiss director Alain Tanner has explored this phenomenon several times, in soul- chilling chronicles of disconnection like "Messidor" and "In the White City." And Fellini's amazingly durable "La Dolce Vita" tells a very similar story; it even has a richer nightmare-orgy atmosphere. A modern marriage that feels solid mostly because it has never been seriously challenged could be a fruitful variation on this strong theme.
   The failure of "Eyes Wide Shut" points up a larger issue, I think: the difficulty of making any purely moral conflict compelling for a modern audience, especially in a movie. There is no longer any easy way to make transgression frightening in a visual medium, because at the visual level we are simply too jaded. We can't be shocked out of our complacency merely by the sight of a forbidden act, or by the sounds of a few forbidden words. (If the f-word falls in the forest, and there's no one to hear it, is it still dirty?) And the point of Schnitzler's story, in which no illicit acts are committed and covetous thoughts alone have the power to undermine a marriage, is surely that the ultimate destructive power of transgression isn't physical at all. This is a hurdle that only the greatest movie artists have ever been able to leap, using the stubbornly concrete and external resources of movies to evoke complex states of feeling and authentic moral tremors.
   It may be tempting to just dismiss Kubrick as a cold-souled formalist, a control freak who worked so hard polishing the surfaces of his films that toward the end he could no longer get beneath the surface. His characters often do seem to be posturing husks, with no discernible inner life. But Stanley Kubrick was, for better or worse, a representative modern artist. If a filmmaker of his steely eminence wrestles with these issues, and if even he is undone by them, the indications for our culture, morally and otherwise, are pretty grim.