Stanley Kubrick‘s “Eyes Wide Shut” was his final effort with his sudden death in 1999, as the movie infamously shot over 400 days starring then-husband-and-wife duo of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman saw a successful NYC doctor (played by Cruise) going down the rabbit hole during the holidays (Christmas decorations and parties, often attributed to drunken sexual hijinks/hook-ups of an older era, adding to the thriller’s unsettling nature with themes of infidelity and sexuality throughout) of a secret society only to show up to an estate outside the city hosting a massive orgy, oragainzed by a group of powerful and dangerous masked people that discover his identity before he’s able to participate.
The movie, at its release, ultimately didn’t do well with critics (notably, most of Kubrick’s films ended up being embraced years after theatrical debuts and scathing reviews), so it’s not unsurprising that veteran screenwriter and filmmaker Paul Schrader doesn’t sound like he had too much of a good time revisiting the movie recently. Schrader, who often doesn’t mince words with his criticisms of other feature films, writers, and filmmakers, posted a rather interesting critique of the Kubrick movie (recently reissued by the fine folks over at The Criterion Collection) on his official Facebook page as the “Taxi Driver” screenwriter took issue with the fawning over of Kubrick’s recreation of NYC in England and the sexuality of the picture, while giving some flowers to the first hour of the film.
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“I watched the Criterion reissue to see if my opinion (not positive) had changed over time. The first hour is [brilliant], razor-sharp dialogue, top-notch performances by Kidman and Cruise. After that, it falls into woo-woo Bosch Imperiati sex party crazyland. After another half hour, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ struggles to right itself on the rails but cannot. It’s like someone who tries to convince you something illogical makes sense, only to make it seem even crazier. The Criterion extras make a big deal about how Kubrick replicated NYC, but even that seems false: wrong extras, body language, street lighting,” Schrader posted over the weekend on Facebook.
That said, for better or worse, the movie is best known for that orgy sequence toward the end of the movie, which seemingly went on a little longer than most were comfortable with. Then again, Americans are known for puritan sentiments when it comes to art and cinema, so sexuality being shown in that manner between anonymous masked strangers adds to the creepiness of the setting Cruise’s character has wandered into during Christmas time (a Christian holiday that replaced various pagan celebrations as the religion became popular across Europe and attempted to co-opt various winter festivals). Perhaps, tapping into one’s religious or societal beliefs could be seen as directly challenged by the film’s use of what could be construed as ritualistic pagan sex in the midst of what was being promoted as a “Christmas” film to audiences at the time.
It’s not all negativity here from Schrader; it is Kubrick after all, but you could maybe sympathize with him that perhaps not all of Kubrick’s ideas in the latter half of the movie were properly presented to audiences in a digestible/clear manner. Some of those perplexing elements has led to many unverified fan theories about what the movie is really about and what Kubrick was trying say with it (some suggesting it was about a cabal of powerful people in the United States using their power/wealth to exploit others, sexually, a sort of presient idea of late given the cover-up and reporting surrounding folks like Jeffrey Epstein and his connections to powerful folks in U.S. politics, billionaires, and even the British royal family). A lot of those ideas are being projected from various modern perspectives, and maybe not thinking with a proper mindset, or that Kubrick had been developing the movie for decades (going back to the late 1960s and early 1970s).
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