While I wouldn’t quite call “Eyes Wide Shut” divisive, Stanley Kubrick‘s final film is either seen as his final masterpiece or a picture where he didn’t quite hit it out of the park. A Christmas movie about breaking up, a dream-like erotic fable about the illusion of monogamy, just like with this other films, “Eyes Wide Shut” offers a lot to unpack. Now, a documentary is going to attempt to do just that.
Tony Zierra, who has just premiered the documentary “Filmworker” about Kubrick’s longtime associate Leon Vitali, has revealed he’s currently at work at “SK13,” an acronym for Kubrick’s last picture.
“The one movie that I feel is the wrinkle in Kubrick’s filmography is ‘Eyes Wide Shut.’ The people that love him always say, ‘He’s a genius, but I’m not sure what the hell that movie was about,’ ” he told Variety, adding: ” [People] just don’t get it. It makes no sense to them. The casting doesn’t make any sense to them. The story doesn’t make any sense to them.”
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of participation Zierra gets from the Kubrick estate, Tom Cruise, and Nicole Kidman — or doesn’t — for his movie. We certainly hope it’s not his attempt to explain the movie to those who “don’t get it.” And we certainly hope he doesn’t try to claim any parallels or not to the lives of the stars or director as explanation for the film’s meaning. Still, “Room 237” proved you could unpack a Kubrick film without laying claim to any specific theory (and indeed, mock the convoluted theories that people concoct).
Certainly, “SK13” will be intriguing for cinephiles, but if you ask me what the one “wrinkle” in Kubrick’s filmography might be, it’s “Full Metal Jacket” (don’t @ me).
