Cinema listings with film information and movie reviews
Eyes Wide Shut
To mark its 20th anniversary, Stanley Kubrick's final labour of love returns to selected cinemas accompanied by Matt Wells's short documentary Never Just A Dream: Stanley Kubrick And Eyes Wide Shut, which goes behind the scenes of the film in the words of the people who knew the auteur best. Eyes Wide Shut is an astounding piece of film-making: a deeply affecting and intensely disturbing examination of how one verbal grenade - a wife's admission to her husband that she almost had an affair - can cause a marriage to fracture and ultimately self-destruct. It's a fitting tribute to the maverick director, full of many of his trademarks (long tracking shots, impeccable Steadicam work, emotionally raw acting), and proves that the husband and wife team of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are two of the finest actors of their generation. Dr William Harford (Cruise) and his pretty wife Alice (Kidman) are a rich Manhattan couple whose sex life appears to be stuck in a rut. After Alice confesses to him that she almost strayed from the marital path, William stumbles out into the night to try to come to terms with his mounting jealousy and to lay to rest the visions in his head (of his wife in flagrante with the other man). During his travels, he encounters a lonely prostitute who offers herself to him, an eccentric costume shop owner who pimps his teenage daughter to visiting businessmen and, most importantly, an old friend from college who directs him towards a gathering of swingers in an eerie country house. Once inside, William witnesses an orgy but flees at the behest of one of the masked guests who warns him "You do not belong here. Go now, while you still can", and returns to his wife to try to reassemble the fractured remains of their marriage. Kidman and Cruise are both terrific in their respective performances: she has by the far the more showy part and makes the most of the explosive monologues to camera; he gives arguably the performance of his life, oozing wounded pride in the earlier scenes and later confusion, fear and total desperation. It was a brave move for the couple to appear on camera together, in such an intense film, but the acquit themselves magnificently, allowing themselves to be stripped physically and emotionally bare by Kubrick. The director is also at the top of his game, gracefully stitching together the fragments of the couple's adventures into a sometimes dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish tapestry of sexual inadequacy and obsession. The attention to detail is amazing, manifested in a grand party thrown by Sydney Pollack's business friend, and the astounding orgy sequence. Ignore all the rumours and hype, and forget the seemingly exorbitant running time (it passes all too quickly): Eyes Wide Shut is a tour-de-force peek inside the souls of two people whose love for one another proves to be both their downfall and their salvation.
