Shaun de Waal Not quite movie of the week
Without the theme of adultery, the cinema would be much diminished, and there would probably be no soap operas at all. Clearly the problems of marriage, monogamy and fidelity are at the heart of Western culture’s conception of love, and there is a tension between the need to stabilise society through family and the desire to let the libido range freely.
This is the subject of the late Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, possibly the most hyped art movie ever. If it all feels a little old, that’s because it is. If the whole dissertation is rather disappointing it is because Kubrick has nothing more to say about the issue than has been said a thousand times already on any number of sitcoms and talk shows. In fact, his conclusions are distinctly conservative – basically, that sex is dangerous and best confined to the nuptial bed.
In the movie (which the obsessively meticulous Kubrick took two years to shoot, with supporting stars such as Harvey Keitel falling by the wayside and Tom Cruise being driven to an ulcer), a happily married couple grapple with the fact that they still have unanswered desires for people other than their spouse. The couple in question is William Harford, a rich young New York doctor, and his wife Alice, played by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, themselves a world- famous couple – practically the portrait of a successful marriage.
They attend a glittering Christmas party at which each flirts with strangers; the next evening Alice tells William of a moment when she could have abandoned her husband and child for sex, and the image of Alice and her would-be paramour settles in William’s mind, becoming part of what sends him on a bizarre odyssey of potential sexual discovery.
Kubrick places much emphasis on the Harfords’ happily married life: where other movies have montage sequences to show a couple falling in love, Kubrick has one showing an ordinary day in the Harfords’ lives. After the party, they nakedly embrace, but instead of sex we go into the daily-life montage. In fact, such foreplay never reaches the point of consummation at all, which is doubtless part of Kubrick’s point – Alice and William aren’t having enough sex, it seems, an impression emphasised by the movie’s closing line.
There is an inconsistency here, though: did they or didn’t they fuck after the caress, before the montage? If they did, the plot is nonsense. If not, what stopped them? In any case, such sights are kept from us viewers. The movie’s steady eschewal of any consummation at all begins to seem like avoidance of sex rather than a way of tackling the issue.
That night, after the montage, and under the influence of what must be the strongest marijuana on earth, Alice divulges her moment of almost madness. This seems to propel Dr William’s own nocturnal adventures, including a chance encounter with a prostitute and his gatecrashing a mysterious orgy. Sex is all around him – at a patient’s deathbed, in the shop where he rents a disguise – and yet nothing quite seems to happen. William is haunted by sex, but seems unable to act. Perhaps, somewhere in the movie’s subconscious, it is all really about impotence.
What is made abundantly clear, by the next night at least, is that sex carries the threat of death. We have gone from the syphilis spectre of the early part of this century (the film’s source, Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, was published in 1926), to the peril of Aids in one bound. For Kubrick, though, the menace is metaphysical, more than anything.
Not that the sex itself seems like a very attractive option. The hieratic staginess of the orgy (overtones of sadomasochistic role-play?) is not inviting, which decreases its power as a temptation for William. At any rate, the wearing of full- face masks must rather limit one’s options in the oral sex department. If Kubrick is trying to de-eroticise extramarital sex here, he succeeds: it’s merely a rather cold spectacle.
Spectacle is, indeed, Kubrick’s strong point. Eyes Wide Shut is well put together, with many superb sequences. Despite the odd longueur, the film doesn’t feel like it’s two and a half hours long. Kidman is good, and Cruise’s attempt to stretch the parameters of his acting repertoire is impressive – unless that’s just the effect of his ulcer.