What can be said about Eyes Wide Shut? This is truly one of the ultimate “love it or hate it” films, and is by far the most contentious film yet included in this series, with a FCQ of 59.79 (Film Contentiousness Quotient — details here).
Whether Kubrick’s final film provided a crowning touch to his legacy, or sadly tarnished it, is the subject of intense, passionate debate. Is the pacing excruciatingly slow, or beautifully dreamlike? Is the wooden acting of Tom Cruise & Nicole Kidman part of the concept — a comment on how the characters “act out” their dual lives — or just bad?
Eyes Wide Shut
- Great! (63%, 10 Votes)
- Terrible! (38%, 6 Votes)
Total Voters: 16
Loading ...Here are a couple opinions from Criticker users.
Cuculiza: “An excellent study of the human mind, obsession with sex and how the society reacts. Slow-paced rythm builds up a sustained suspense throughout the entire movie. The performances are on point.”
Droplet00: “If this is all Stanley Kubrick figured out about about love, sex and desire in his long years, god save him.”
Last week’s polls are closed, on King Kong and Marie Antoinette, and the results are in: both are great (Marie Antoinette by a single vote!)
And just to prove that we don’t always have to disagree, here are two more films that are the opposite of contentious:
Unanimously Crap (FCQ 0.49): I Still Know What You Did Last Summer… don’t you care?
Unanimously Sweet (FCQ 4.44): Vertigo. Perhaps Hitchcock’s greatest masterpiece.
Damn you, Criticker, how can you say such things?
Kubrick is my favorite director of all times. Maybe some foreign directors seem better to other people’s taste and I can’t argue that, but there should be no debate about the fact that Kubrick is without doubt the greatest american director of the twentieth century.
That said, Kubrick never failed. I didn’t get the chance to see his shorts, which he himself dislike (an urban myth says that he hated so much his first short [being the short praised by critics, to which he responded the short was 'like a child's drawing on the fridge'], that he tracked down every single copy and destroyed it), but not one of the films I saw by him fell under the 10th tier, top of the 9th tier minimum - and ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is no exception.
I have no idea why people dislike this film. Having said that, I have also no idea why people who do like it call ‘dreamlike’. There’s nothing dreamlike about ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. In fact, it is a very down to earth, slow thriller about a man in a moment of crisis. It is slow, of course, but for me it was hypnotic - once I fell for it I couldn’t look away.
I have also no idea on what’s so ‘wooding’ about the performances in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. Yes, the acting is a bit numb, but none of us were expecting Tom Cruise to jump over the rooftops screaming “YEAH!!! ORGY!!”. I’m actually not a big fan of Tom Cruise, but as I keep insisting, his performance in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is one of the greatest I have ever seen. If the haters of the film would ever try to comprehend the complex personality of Tom Cruise’s character, they would have found much more to the film than they ever cared to observe.
In conclusion, I fail to fathom how Kubrick ‘tranished his legacy’ in a film so characteristic for him - slow paced, distant to the viewer and yet emotionally evoking, a film that investigates so closely the human pattern. Seeing so many people hating the film, all I can think of is - did you even bother?
…but there should be no debate about the fact that Kubrick is without doubt the greatest American director of the twentieth century.
Oh, I’ll debate this quite strongly. I’ll take the bodies of work of Scorsese, Welles, Allen, and Wilder before Kubrick without thinking twice, and others would provide strong competition, like Cassavetes or, yes, Spielberg. But that’s not the point of this post, so back on topic:
Eyes Wide Shut is my second favorite Kubrick film (after The Shining). It’s one of Kubrick’s few films I’ve seen that uses its slow pacing and rhythm to create a style that I enjoy - 2001 is great but it’s never been a personal favorite of mine. The use of color is really incredible, the mystery of its plot and the use of sexuality as a means of human exploration is fascinating to me.