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Or: Fantasy is not what it used to be. Absent of tension, absent of desire, absent of flirtation, absent of the hint of promising something more, "Eyes Wide Shut," the final film by Stanley Kubrick, heretofore one of our most brilliant filmmakers -– is like a bad date. I got all excited about it in advance and then it turned out to be excruciatingly long and a big bore.

Profoundly frustrating. "Eyes Wide Shut" reveals nothing. The most interesting moments, and there are really only two or three, demonstrate that Nicole Kidman has a measure of agility as an actress, and that contrary to what she recently demonstrated on Broadway in "The Blue Room" (another sexless sex play), there is something to her that can be toyed with ... but what? Was Kubrick playing with the power couple when he cast them as an affluent New York doctor and his wife? The idea was to dip into the dark side of jealousy, of marriage. But there is no dark side here ... in fact, there are no sides at all, only surface; slick, shiny surface.

Cruise’s performance is incredibly wooden -- it is hard to watch this formerly boyish, formerly sexy guy attempting to play doctor -- he is less convincing than the average 5-year-old playing the same game. Cruise is caught in an extended adolescence, not adult enough, not sophisticated enough, not evolved enough for the role. I can accept him as a fly boy, a race car driver and even a Vietnam vet, but as an uptown doctor consumed by sexual jealousy? You’ve got to be kidding.

There was a moment in "Eyes Wide Shut" that intrigued me: Cruise is walking down a New York City street late at night, a gang of young men appears and taunts him about his sexuality, calling him a homo, etc. Here I thought perhaps something could happen, Kubrick-Cruise could take on the recurring rumors about Cruise’s real-life sexuality. I thought perhaps Kubrick had staged the moment to push Cruise ... but then nothing happens.

And going forward with the notion of nothing happening, the infamous orgy scene is laughable: orgy as quasi-religious experience. Cruise takes a taxi to an enormous house, repeats a cheesy password and enters a palace where a bunch of weirdos engage in a faux orgiastic dry hump with a bunch of Stepfordy, zoned-out women with 50-foot legs and over-inflated tits. It is so absent of eroticism as to be remarkable, to win the award for Worst Orgy.

What happened to the tease, the fantastic and delicious torture of desire and the thrill of fantasy? Why does Kidman’s confession of desire for a Naval officer throw Cruise for such a loop that he is suddenly hurling himself toward prostitutes, orgies, anything remotely hinting of sexuality? Fantasy, flirtation can and should be used to reinvigorate a marriage. Bring it back into the bedroom, Cruise could have asked -- How does he do it to you? -- and we would have been on the edge of our seats. Can I watch? Tell me about it. He could have turned fear into a game, a dark and sexy game.

I want to see the movie that wasn’t made, the movie that gave Tom Cruise the ulcer, a two-hour reel of scenes between Cruise, Kidman and Kubrick. I want to hear what they were thinking, I want to see what they threw out -- the trash.

There must be something there.

I picture something like Eleanor Coppola’s stunning documentary about the making of "Apocalypse Now." I want to see that applied to the Cruise-Kidman marriage. That is the movie that would truly take them somewhere and return them, and us, transformed.
salon.com | July 23, 1999

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