Eyes Wide Shut (2007, DVD)

This is a film about a blind man. Not in terms of actual vision, he can see as well as the rest of us, his eyes are normal, but he cannot perceive the world around him. Dr. Bill Harford can diagnose the ill, move through life doing the right thing, making social contact with old friends and his patients, but he is a sleepwalker. Pity he can't see his wife either.

People were troubled, titillated and disturbed by this film when it was released. The frank and graphic depictions of sex bothered a great many, who derided the film as pornographic. Inspired by the novella "Traumenovelle" (Dreamstory) by Arthur Schnitzler, it is a tale of a man who is waking from a dream. Or is he entering into it? The answer is left to the viewer to decide.

This is a disturbing film to watch. There are no heroes, no villains, simply the story of a man, whose world is turned upside down in the course of three nights, and then given a good shake. Characters are connected by the slightest of threads, the only common one being Dr. Bill himself, caught up in the middle of this web of his own devising. The first time I saw this movie, I didn't understand it. About the third viewing I began to see patterns and rhythms and the mood shifting, and then I realized that the film wasn't about sex at all, it's about perception. The sex, you see, was just the hook to make you watch.

The cast of players is small, there's Dr. Bill (Tom Cruise), our traveller; Alice (Nicole Kidman), his wife; and their daughter, by all appearances a close-knit and loving family in upper class New York City. He's a successful doctor, she's a stay at home mom with an art background. It's the holiday season, they go to a ritzy party, he helps an influential friend, meets an old one, she flirts with a decadent older stranger, revealing a side of herself that the viewer has a suspicion that her husband has no idea of. And that night leads into an ever tangling knot of people, leading to one of them on a slab in a morgue by the film's end. There are tenuous threads here between people, chance meetings, the symbolism of masks, mirrors, costumes, and glass all giving the impression that if you look just a little bit harder, you would really see what was going on, that the illusion would be peeled away and you would see the truth.

Throughout this film the viewer is an eavesdropper. You hear conversations, view dreams and rage, see reflections, always shifting, left with the impression that you've only gotten there a minute too early, or late, that if you had waited or hurried, you would have seen This is a wicked device on the part of the director, and very well done.

As for our hero, he goes on a journey, into himself. His wife reveals to him in the course of an argument a hidden truth about herself - and the pain is writ there on her face for you to see, a hunger that is kept damped down by her love for her husband and child, her eyes in the mirror betray Alice in a sequence that I found almost unbearable to watch, the intensity was too much. Upon each viewing, I found myself becoming more sympathetic towards her, able to understand her plight. Every glance in the mirror seemed to say to me, "Look at me! I am here! I am not what you think I am!" And for Dr. Bill, the first crack in his reality comes when he is literally forced to reveal himself, and it is there, in his look, that he discovers that he really has no control over himself or his life, that he's been wearing that mask all his life. That his manipulation of people has gotten him no where at all. And by the end of the movie, he's a touch older and sadder and hopefully a little wiser, and he and his wife have come full circle, with the hope of reconciliation at the end.

The impression that I had by the end of this movie was that you can't trust anything you see, that most of us go through life with our eyes wide shut, not seeing or acknowledging the threads that are binding us to each other. None of Stanley Kubrick's films were easy or explainable. On first look the film is incomprehensible, but on repeat viewings, more of it begins to make sense.

This film is a hard R. There are graphic depictions of sex, nudity, drug abuse, infidelity, and prostitution; if any of this bothers you, please don't watch this movie. The language is also frank and explicit. However, the settings, costumes, music and cinematography are excellent.