Die Hard is a Christmas movie. We know this because the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland—honestly, one of the great cultural institutions of the Washington area—screens it as part of its Holiday Classics series each December. (Though I would argue that Die Hard II is even more obviously a Christmas movie: Like many a Christmas film, its plot centers on someone’s harried attempt to to get home for the holiday.)
But, there’s a movie that’s even more obviously a Christmas classic, even if it doesn’t get the notice it deserves as such: Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick’s steamy 1999 drama starring Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Sydney Pollack is a movie about, (in no particular order) AIDS, child prostitution, adultery, secret sex societies, and drugs. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a bona fide Yuletide classic. The last film he completed before his death, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut practically smells of eggnog and pine, so Christmasy is it.
The movie opens as Cruise and Kidman are departing for a lavish Christmas party. A spectacular Christmas tree stands in the atrium of the Manhattan mansion they visit; a fantastic Christmas light display illuminates the ballroom for dancing. OK, so the party concludes with a hooker overdosing on a speedball of heroin and cocaine in an upstairs bathroom: Let’s just say it’s a very Kubrick Christmas.
Through its two and a half hour running time, Eyes Wide Shut follows Cruise’s character as he navigates scenes of sexual expression and depravity in and around New York City. Christmas is everywhere, in scenes highbrow and low. At nearly every den of iniquity he visits—a sleazy jazz club; a prostitute’s cramped, depressing apartment; a costume shop where a father sells his teenage daughter’s body—Christmas is there. They all have Christmas trees, and most rooms are festooned with Christmas lights. The higher class salons that Cruise visits—his own condo on Central Park West; a dying friend’s apartment—also all feature Christmas trees.
Indeed, there is only one indoor space that Cruise visits that does not have a Christmas tree—a mansion outside of New York where a sex cult meets in disguise for a mass orgy. Yet even there, Kubrick nods to the holiday season. The mansion, after all, is surrounded by a forest of what appear to be Douglas Firs—the king of the Christmas trees.
The constant presence of Christmas decorations allowed Kubrick to shoot most of the film in natural light, as he often liked to do. (The movie, on a pure aesthetic level, is a triumph.)
But it’s clear that the auteur wanted a particularly Christmas-oriented theme for the movie on a deeper level. Eyes Wide Shut is based on short Austrian novel, Dream Story. In the book, the protagonist is Jewish, as was Kubrick. Yet when he adapted the book for the screen, Kubrick renamed the main character “Bill Hartford” and gave the film an undeniably Christmasy bent. So much so that the final scene of the movie takes place in an ersatz version of that pantheon of all things Yuletide: F.A.O. Schwartz.
Eyes Wide Shut just recently started streaming on Netflix. Stream it on Christmas Eve to get in the holiday spirit. Perhaps after the kids have been put to bed and Santa’s presents have all been delivered.
