Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic mystery psychological drama film directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick. It is based on the 1...

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic mystery psychological drama film directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick. It is based on the 1926 novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story) by Arthur Schnitzler, transferring the story's setting from early twentieth-century Vienna to 1990s New York City. The plot centers on a doctor (Tom Cruise) who is shocked when his wife (Nicole Kidman) reveals that she had contemplated having an affair a year earlier. He then embarks on a night-long adventure, during which he infiltrates a masked orgy of an unnamed secret society. {full_page}

Kubrick obtained the filming rights for Dream Story in the 1960s, considering it a perfect text for a film adaptation about sexual relations. He revived the project in the 1990s when he hired writer Frederic Raphael to help him with the adaptation. The film, which was mostly shot in England, apart from some exterior establishing shots, includes a detailed recreation of exterior Greenwich Village street scenes made at Pinewood Studios. The film's production, at 400 days, holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous film shoot.

Kubrick died six days after showing the final cut of Eyes Wide Shut to Warner Bros., making it the final film he directed. He reportedly considered it his "greatest contribution to the art of cinema". In order to ensure a theatrical R rating in the United States, Warner Bros. digitally altered several sexually explicit scenes during post-production. This version was released on July 16, 1999, to moderately positive reactions from film critics.

Box office receipts for the film worldwide were about $162 million, making it Kubrick's highest-grossing film. The uncut version has since been released in DVD, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats. Eyes Wide Shut has been included in several lists of the greatest films of the 1990s.

Dr. William "Bill" Harford and his wife Alice live in New York City with their daughter Helena. They attend a Christmas party hosted by wealthy patient Victor Ziegler, where Bill is reunited with Nick Nightingale, an old medical school classmate who dropped out and now plays the piano professionally. An older Hungarian guest attempts to seduce Alice, and two young models attempt to seduce Bill. He is interrupted by his host, who had been having sex with Mandy, a young woman who has overdosed on a speedball. Mandy recovers with Bill's aid.

The following evening, while smoking marijuana, Alice and Bill discuss their episodes of unfulfilled temptation. Bill tells Alice he is not jealous of other men's attraction to her because he deems women naturally inclined to fidelity. She then discloses that during their vacation on Cape Cod, she encountered a naval officer and fantasized about him enough that she considered leaving Bill and their daughter. Bill is disturbed by Alice's revelation before being called to the house of a patient who has just died. The patient's distraught daughter, Marion, unsuccessfully tries to seduce Bill.

Upon leaving, he engages with a sex worker named Domino. Alice phones when they start kissing, prompting Bill to have a change of heart. He pays Domino for the sexless encounter and meets Nick at a jazz club. Nick describes an impending engagement where he must play piano blindfolded in events featuring beautiful women. It all takes place in a mysterious mansion in Shoreside Vale, in locality Cedar Grove, outside of New York. Invitees require a costume, a mask and a password. Bill goes to a costume shop and offers the owner, Milich, a generous amount of money to rent a costume. Inside the shop, Milich is outraged when he catches his young daughter with two men.

Bill takes a taxi to the country mansion mentioned by Nick. He gives the password and discovers a sexual ritual is taking place. One of the masked women warns him he is in terrible danger. Bill is ushered to a crowded room and unmasked by the master of ceremonies. The woman who had tried to warn Bill intervenes and insists on redeeming him, at an undisclosed personal cost. Bill is let off with a warning not to tell anyone about what happened.

Bill arrives home guilty and confused. He finds Alice laughing in her sleep and awakens her. She tearfully explains a dream in which she was having sex with the naval officer and many other men, and laughing at the idea of Bill witnessing the scene. The next morning, Bill goes to Nick's hotel. The desk clerk explains that a bruised and frightened Nick checked out hours earlier escorted by two dangerous-looking men. Bill returns the costume but seems to have misplaced the mask, and learns that Milich has sold his teenage daughter into sex slavery.

That afternoon, plagued by thoughts of his wife sleeping with the naval officer, Bill leaves his practice early to return to the site of the orgy. As he stands at the front gate, a man comes down to greet him and hands him an envelope addressed to him by name. Inside is an anonymous letter issuing him a second warning to stay away.

Bill calls Marion, but when her fiancé answers he hangs up. Bill heads to Domino's apartment, apparently having decided to consummate his affair. However, he is greeted by a woman who claims that she is Domino's roommate, Sally. There is obvious sexual tension between Bill and Sally but she then reveals that Domino had received just that morning the results of a test that indicated that she was HIV-positive. Bill leaves.

Having left the apartment, Bill notices he is being followed by a mysterious figure. He sees the news about an ex-beauty queen's death from an overdose, goes to the morgue, and identifies her as Mandy. He is then summoned by Ziegler, who reveals he was a guest in the orgy and identified Bill through his connection with Nick. Ziegler claims the secret society's warnings are only intended to scare Bill from speaking about the orgy. However, he implies that the society is capable of acting on its threats.

Bill asks about Nick's disappearance and Mandy's death, correctly identifying her as the masked orgy participant who sacrificed herself for him. Ziegler insists that Nick is safely back home in Seattle, and the punishment was part of the same charade of intimidation and had nothing to do with Mandy's death. He also says that Mandy was an addict who had died from another accidental drug overdose. Bill does not know whether Ziegler is telling the truth about Nick's whereabouts or Mandy's death.

Returning home, Bill finds the rented mask on his pillow next to his sleeping wife. He breaks down in tears and tells Alice the whole truth of the past two days. The next morning, they go Christmas shopping with their daughter. Bill apologizes to Alice, and Alice muses that they should be grateful that their marriage and mutual love survived. She suggests that there is something they need to do "as soon as possible". When Bill asks what, she simply responds,...

Cast

Tom Cruise as Dr. William "Bill" Harford

Nicole Kidman as Alice Harford

Sydney Pollack as Victor Ziegler

Todd Field as Nick Nightingale

Marie Richardson as Marion Nathanson

Sky du Mont as Sandor Szavost

Thomas Gibson as Carl

Vinessa Shaw as Domino

Fay Masterson as Sally

Alan Cumming as Hotel Desk Clerk

Leelee Sobieski as Milich's daughter

Eyes Wide Shut developed after Stanley Kubrick read Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story in 1968, when Kubrick was looking for a project to follow 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick was interested in adapting the story, and with the help of journalist Jay Cocks, bought the filming rights to the novel. For the following decade, Kubrick considered making the Dream Story adaptation a sex comedy "with a wild and somber streak running through it", starring Steve Martin or Woody Allen in the main role. The project was revived in 1994 when Kubrick hired Frederic Raphael to work on the script, updating the setting from early 20th century Vienna to late 20th century New York City. Kubrick invited his friend Michael Herr, who helped write Full Metal Jacket, to make revisions, but Herr declined for fear he would be underpaid and have to commit to a long production.

Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Dream Story is set around Vienna after the turn of the century. The main characters are a couple named Fridolin and Albertina. The couple's home is a typical suburban middle-class home. Like the protagonist of the novel, Schnitzler was Jewish, lived in Vienna, and was a doctor, although he left medicine to write.

Kubrick frequently removed references to the Jewishness of characters in the novels he adapted. In Eyes Wide Shut, Frederic Raphael, who is Jewish, wanted to keep the Jewish background of the protagonists, but Kubrick disagreed and removed details that would identify characters as Jewish. Kubrick determined Bill should be a "Harrison Ford-ish goy" and created the surname of Harford as an allusion to the actor. In the film, Bill is taunted with homophobic slurs. In the novella, the taunters are members of an anti-Semitic college fraternity. In an introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of Dream Story, Raphael wrote that "Fridolin is not declared to be a Jew, but his feelings of cowardice, for failing to challenge his aggressor, echo the uneasiness of Austrian Jews in the face of Gentile provocation."

The novella is set during the Carnival, when people often wear masks to parties. The party that both husband and wife attend at the opening of the story is a Carnival Masquerade ball, whereas the film's story begins at Christmas time.