Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

I was so excited to see it — and I was very, very disappointed.

— Christopher Nolan

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To say that the pool room scene is doubled by the Somerton orgy is not to say that one is the 'truth' of the other. Or, rather, it is to say that they are BOTH the hidden truth of each other. Eyes Wide Shut is very clear-eyed about the way in which power always contains two aspects, simultaneously: excessive mystagogic staging and banal normalization are two sides of the same coin.

— Mark Fisher

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One last time Stanley Kubrick had flouted genre expectations, and once again, as throughout his career, critics could only see what wasn't there. [T]he real pornography in this film is in its lingering depiction of the shameless, naked wealth of millennial Manhattan, and of its obscene effect on society and the human soul. [F]or those with their eyes open, there are plenty of money shots.

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The Harfords themselves (like most of the film's reviewers) don't really see their surrounding mise-en-scène—their wealth, their art, the ubiquitous Christmas glitz. They're preoccupied instead with their own petty lusts and jealousies.

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Everyone [Alice] encounters in the first fifteen minutes of the film compliments her appearance; Bill dutifully tells her she always looks beautiful, the babysitter exclaims, "You look amazing, Mrs. Harford," and she's also flattered by such admirers of beauty as Victor Ziegler and Sandor Szavost. Ziegler tells her she looks "absolutely stunning—and I don't say that to all the women." "Oh, yes he does," retorts his wife—a joke that resonates unfunnily when we find out who "all the women" associated with Ziegler are. [A]lice's real status is unmistakably suggested: the wife as prostitute. She's identified with the hooker Mandy through a series of parallels: they're both tall redheads with a taste for numbing drugs, we first see them both in bathrooms.

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When Ziegler finally calls [Bill] onto the carpet for his transgressions, he chuckles at Bill's refusal of a case of 25-year-old Scotch[,] not just because this extravagance would be a trifle to him, but because Bill's pretense of integrity is an empty gesture—he's already been bought. Bill may be able to buy, bribe, and command his own social inferiors, and he may own Alice, but he's Ziegler's man.

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The open-ended narrative forces us to ask ourselves what we're really seeing; is Eyes Wide Shut a movie about marriage, sex, and jealousy, or about money, whores, and murder? Before you make up your own mind, consider this: has there ever been a Stanley Kubrick film in which someone didn't get killed?

— Tim Kreider

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[Kubrick's] relationship to the very idea of actors was bipolar. Should one use them as mannequins (Robert Bresson’s word for his practice with non-actors), or find good ones and let them tear up the scenery? The latter sort of permissiveness had resulted in Sellers’s work in Lolita and Dr Strangelove and would lead – with more mixed results – to Jack Nicholson’s performance in The Shining. Kubrick’s ambivalence in this matter faced a final test in Eyes Wide Shut. Was Tom Cruise an actor or a mannequin?

— David Bromwich (London Review of Books)

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A wonderful and wicked comedy of remarriage, […] Eyes White Shut deliriously mashed up millennial New York and fin de siècle Vienna in an attempt to suggest that certain things—social climbing, secret fantasies, and the dirty thrill of hearing A-listers whisper the f-word in a multiplex release—never go out of style. The film’s notorious orgy sequences, scrupulously rooted in research about Viennese secret societies and adorned with the aesthetics of commedia dell’arte, earned Stanley Kubrick and Co. an NC-17 rating; Roger Ebert called it “an adult film in every atom of its being.” The cloaked CGI figures inserted after the director’s death to block out the most explicit sex acts weren’t just concessions to the MPAA but avatars of an encroaching and totalizing image manipulation (and Hollywood puritanism) whose presence made Eyes Wide Shut seem even more out of time.

— Adam Nayman (The Ringer)

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However unique, strange, and perfectly incomplete Eyes Wide Shut may be, it does, in my eyes, represent a kind of culmination and ending point of ’90s adult cinema (if not of adult films in general). It features two real stars lugging heavy, real-life baggage into the frame; it’s a study of desire and its discontents, and it ends with the f-word. The period of the American erotic thriller, which was, after all, a brief mixed bag, ends with a weird, dissonant bang—and with a little dose of CGI [puritanism which] in retrospect seems like a sign of things to come.

— Manuela Lazic (The Ringer)

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Its release in the last year of the last decade of the 20th century feels like a fated rhyme for the fin-de-siècle energy of Schnitzler’s novella — set in Vienna roughly 100 years earlier — a rhyme that resonates with another story about upper-class people floating so high above their own lives they can see the whole world clearly save for the abyss that’s yawning open at their feet.

— David Ehrlich (IndieWire)

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My piano skills were those of a trombone player. I knew the keyboard, could pluck out the chart and learn it by rote. To prepare, I worked with the great jazz pianist Eric Reed, who I met through my friend Ben Wolfe. In fact, it was Ben’s idea for the player intro at the end at the Sonata Café. I worked my ass off for that scene, but Stanley never really showed my hands. That was frustrating, considering we shot this after Ziegler’s, where one day Stanley sat down on the piano bench next to me and said, “I wonder why it’s so hard for you? I mean, Cornel Wilde wasn’t a pianist, and he did it so well in A Song to Remember.” To which I replied, “Yes, Stanley, but Cornel Wilde didn’t have to play a four-handed piano part.” He loved to needle me. All the extras were friends, and Stanley would drag them up to the bandstand and say things like, “Jimmy here is a professional pianist and doesn’t think your feet look right on the pedals.” But we have a piano at home that I play. And in a way, I’m guilty of the same crime in TÁR, as I never once showed Cate’s hands on that Steinway in the Juilliard scene.

— Todd Field (Interview in IndieWire)