In all the words that have been devoted to the films of Stanley Kubrick, I do not know whether any writer has invoked Gustave Flaubert’s famous injunction to “be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Yet no 20th-century artist, writer, filmmaker, composer, or otherwise, better embodied the spirit of Flaubert’s counsel than Kubrick.
Kubrick made a practice of rebuffing rumors of his alleged reclusiveness and dottiness, but as with most generalizations, there were shards of accuracy within them. Born in New York in 1928, Kubrick reestablished himself so comfortably in England that he declined to leave even when his films were set in a haunted Colorado hotel (The Shining) or Vietnam (Full Metal Jacket). That he was married three times is somehow less notable — less reflective of his actual retiring personality off the set — than the fact that his third marriage, to actress-turned-painter Christiane Harlan, lasted from 1958 until his death in 1999. Together, they raised three daughters. Many dogs are said to have occupied his estate.
Perhaps it would be uncharitable to call Kubrick a hermit, exactly, but it is certainly accurate to say he relished what seems to have been a “regular and orderly” home life. Perhaps, like Flaubert, Kubrick knew that his domestic tidiness and calmness enabled him to commit to the screen far less peaceable visions in such classic films as Dr. Strangelove (1964) or 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). These films still stir with their meticulously rendered portraits of madness, folly, and terror.
In his last film, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick for the first and only time acknowledged the hold that domestic life had on him — and the worry he seemed to carry over its diminishment or evaporation. The film was just released in a new restoration on 4K UHD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, and if it remains the most modestly scaled of his works — certainly since 1962’s Lolita — it is clearly his most self-revealing.
Not that the film was anything but a sensation 26 years ago. On account of its release in theaters four months after Kubrick’s death that March, Eyes Wide Shut was ubiquitous in a manner that is nearly inconceivable today, especially in its commandeering of legacy media: Entertainment Tonight tracked the yearslong production in regular updates, The Today Show broadcast the first publicly available footage from the film, Time magazine plastered its stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, on its cover. And Roger Ebert deemed it sufficiently significant to make it the topic of the entirety of an episode of his movie review show. Advertisements could be found everywhere on TV — you know, during breaks on ER — and Chris Isaak could be found on late-night talk shows discussing Kubrick’s use of his song “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing.”
Yet far more consequential than the movie’s media blitz was its obvious autobiography. In Kubrick’s thoroughgoing reimagination of Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, Cruise plays Bill Harford, a physician in contemporary New York. His home life is unexceptional but comfortable. Bill is married to Alice (Kidman), a former gallerist who has traded that life for full-time motherhood. The Harfords have just one daughter to Kubrick’s three, but their apartment is luxurious with parquet flooring, handsome furnishings, and innumerable paintings by the real Mrs. Kubrick.
Bill is like Kubrick to the extent that he savors family life, but his sense of contentment is disrupted when Alice, frustrated at her husband for being too cavalier in flirting with a pair of dissipated fashion models at a Christmas party, exacts psychological revenge by upending his expectations about her fidelity. In a scene startling for its length and candor, Alice announces that she once entertained leaving him for a naval officer she laid eyes on only fleetingly. Long before she won an Oscar for The Hours (and became a prisoner of such pretentious arthouse movies as Babygirl), Kidman portrayed a character for whom a vanishingly brief encounter remained both a potent memory and a powerful cudgel. Eyes Wide Shut is often commended for its dreamlike ambience, and while acknowledging the film’s many nighttime scenes and generally nocturnal sense of rhythm and logic, it is most alive to the daydreams its characters create for themselves: Alice’s imagined infidelity is transmitted to her husband, who replays, in his mind’s eye and in graphic detail, his own version of that near-affair.
Simmering over Alice’s quasiconfession of having committed adultery, so to speak, in her heart, Bill does something Kubrick would never have done in life: he throws caution to the wind. Since his sense of marital well-being was apparently illusory, he reckons he has little to lose when he accepts the entreaties of a lonely prostitute (Vinessa Shaw), offers little resistance to a sad woman who expresses inexplicable love for him (Marie Richardson), or sweet-talks his way into a masked-ball orgy given for the benefit of various unscrupulous and morally bankrupt elites.
Yet Eyes Wide Shut is decidedly not a film about Bill sloughing off his upper-middle-class propriety. His encounter with the prostitute concludes long before it is consummated, and his tour through the masked ball culminates with the revelation of his status as an intruder. Ultimately, Bill is not intrigued by these brushes with the carnally profane but repelled by them. He winces and recoils from what he sees, and, when he is given reason to believe that his surreptitious adventures have resulted in at least one death, he is plagued by anxiety. No Kubrick film is more thoroughly Kafkaesque. In the back end of the film, Kubrick, by and large, drops jealousy as the defining feature of Bill’s character; by this point, preservation of himself and others is his main goal as he attempts to sort out how much damage has been caused by his venturing where he should not.
Eyes Wide Shut plays like a 2 1/2 brief on behalf of regular, orderly lives. As far as Kubrick is concerned, no good has come from Alice troubling Bill with a fantasy that was never acted upon, nor Bill permitting himself to consider engaging in various profane behavior. The film is not about its characters’ self-actualization but their withdrawal into the roles in which they began: husband, wife, father, and mother.
Kubrick brings the story to a close in a toy store — a nod to the movie’s increasingly admired Christmas setting, replete with sparkly white lights in many scenes, but a significant choice for the location’s inherent morality despite its richly deserved R rating. (In this, Eyes Wide Shut is not far from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.) Here, as Bill and Alice again pledge their troth to one another while their daughter looks for Christmas gifts, we sense Kubrick justifying his own hermetically sealed family life. This is not an ironic ending in the manner of A Clockwork Orange or Full Metal Jacket, in which the characters’ freedom is measured in their freedom to do terrible things, but a genuinely reassuring one in which the characters’ wisdom is measured by their willingness to honor their vows’ promise of monogamy.
The Criterion edition is tricked out with the usual heaping of special features, including new interviews with cameraman Larry Smith and set decorator and second-unit director Lisa Leone — the latter exactly the sort of low-on-the-totem-pole person with whom Kubrick would get along and in whom he would vest an inordinate amount of responsibility. (His longtime assistant, former character actor Leon Vitali, is the chief such example.) Above all, the restoration precisely represents the tactile textures present in the film’s 35mm prints during its release over a quarter of a century ago. It is especially important to note Kubrick’s care in executing his visual scheme — his Steadicam ranges through sets that often seem enveloped in primary colors of yellow, blue, or red — because it reflects his investment in the material. He took such pains because he believed in what he was saying, which, in this case, amounted to: stay true to your spouse, and don’t ask too many questions.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
