Yule Love It: Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

When it was released in 1999, Eyes Wide Shut was, for many people, hard to simply review as a movie. This was, after all, the final film from director Stanley Kubrick. He had died just days after handing over his final (?) cut to the studio, the shooting schedule had gone way over schedule (to the point that it’s still recognised as having the lengthiest ongoing shooting schedule ever), and it placed THE Hollywood power couple of the time – Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman – in the centre of what seemed to be an erotic thriller.

In some ways, it’s still hard to simply review the movie. It still is the final film that Kubrick directed, it still has the legacy of that whirlwind of speculation and criticism that came about before anyone had seen the thing, and some said it contributed to the disintegration of the Cruise-Kidman marriage (they divorced in . . .  2001, which could be viewed as an amusing irony).

What's it all about though? Well, Cruise plays Dr. William Harford and Kidman plays his wife, Alice. They seem to be happy, successful people, yet Cruise is troubled when his wife confesses to him about a time when she was almost unfaithful. Having to head out to deal with a patient, still processing what he has been told, Harford finds himself drawn into a world of temptation, lust, and hedonism.

When it gets things right, Eyes Wide Shut is an interesting and frank look at how quickly adults can get themselves tied up in knots over sex, the chance to explore new sensations, and what can occur when wearing a cloak of anonymity compared to how we weigh things up when wearing our public persona. It shows how easily you can want to chase something, how a fire can start raging within from just one or two tiny sparks.

But when it gets things wrong, as it does here and there, it's a bit of a mess. The treatment of various female characters (mainly those played by Vinessa Shaw and Leelee Sobieski, but almost every female onscreen is dealt with in an unfairly harsh way while the men get off largely scot-free) is problematic, to say the least. Cruise and Kidman aren't doing their best work, although kudos to them for taking on these roles and placing themselves entirely in the hands of Kubrick. And then there's the music, which is so bad at times that it's hard to imagine Kubrick ever thought it good enough, especially when you consider his knack for picking the perfect audio choices to accompany his visuals over the years.

The lengthy runtime also doesn't help either, although there are very few scenes that I would want to see removed. Everything feeds into the main idea(s) being explored, even if a lot of it feels unnecessary. It's hard to keep track of the amount of time that's supposed to be passing onscreen, but I think that works well as a sign of the bewildered and overly-stimulated mindset of the main character.

This may not be the masterpiece that fans would have hoped would cap the end of a magnificent directorial career but it's another film aimed squarely at adults by a director who almost always picked his projects based on his own passion for the material. And it has a decent role for Sydney Pollack, a fever-dream atmosphere throughout, and ends a glorious career in cinema with the word "fuck".

7/10

Here's a great way to get most of Kubrick's movies in one set.
Americans may want to splash out on this option.

Noir November: The Killing (1956)

An early film in the career of one Mr. Stanley Kubrick, The Killing may be a relatively low-budget, low-key movie compared to some of his later works, but it's no less enjoyable for it. Based on a novel ("Clean Break") by Lionel White, this is a tense, unhurried look at a group of criminals planning a major heist.

The main players are: Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), the man with the plan, a corrupt cop named Randy Kennan (Ted De Corsia), a teller who works at the racecourse they're planning to rob (Elisha Cook Jr), a sharpshooter (Timothy Carey), and a couple of other guys who will help to distract people while the robbery occurs. Everything is planned out precisely, and onscreen details, as well as narration, help viewers to keep track of just how all of the pieces fall into place. But no plan is foolproof, is it?

Kubrick may be working on a smaller scale here, compared to his more famous works, but he shows the same attention to detail and clinical approach to the material that cinema fans would respond so well to. The script, with dialogue by Jim Thompson, nicely balances things out between the specifics of the job and the drama derived from the fluctuating dynamic of the group.

Performances are pretty great across the board, especially for a film that many would consider as nothing more than a b-movie (I guess). Hayden, Corsia, Carey and the others all do well, but I have to admit that Cook Jr. is someone I have always loved seeing onscreen, and his role here is a great one. Coleen Gray and Marie Windsor also do well, being the two main women in a film that focuses very much on the men. The fact that two make such a memorable impression, for very different reasons, is further testament to the script and their performances.

I'm not sure how audiences would have reacted to the content back in 1956, when this was first released, but it seems to have enough darker elements in there to make some people uncomfortable. There are some moments of violence, as expected from a film about an armed robbery, a healthy dollop of cynicism coating everything, and at least one outburst that uses a racial slur to shocking, though also brilliant, effect.

With it being so slight, however, it's hard to push this forward as an essential noir viewing. Yet it's easy to see how influential it has been, at least on certain people (Tarantino, I'm looking at you). It's also simply an excellent little movie that doesn't outstay its welcome. Give it a watch soon, if you've not seen it already.

8/10

http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Criterion-Collection-Blu-ray/dp/B005152C78/ref=sr_1_10?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1415885702&sr=1-10&keywords=the+killing

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