In the summer of 1999, when I was 16, I wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times. To my surprise, the Times published it.
The subject of my adolescent missive, titled “Don’t Call Him Cold,” was what I took to be a profound mischaracterization of Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut.
The film, which Warner Bros. brought out four months after Kubrick’s death at 70, was not even one weekend old when the Times published a derisive essay by critic Michiko Kakutani. The maker of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, Kakutani argued, had miscast himself as the director of Eyes Wide Shut, which was, at its core, a searing sketch of a marriage between guileless physician Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his somewhat more evolved wife Alice (Nicole Kidman, who, lest we forget, was then the real-life spouse of Cruise).
Yet all that potential for drama was wasted on a director not at home with emotional material, claimed Kakutani. I retorted that Eyes Wide Shut was, in fact, “a film of extraordinary power and emotion, whose final scene may rank with the most moving and stunningly played that Kubrick ever directed.”
Well, 20 years after the release of Eyes Wide Shut, I still think I was right and Kakutani was wrong. To be sure, Kubrick did his part to earn some of the adjectives — “chilly,” “sterile,” “cynical” — that are frequently tossed in his direction. Yet Eyes Wide Shut complicates our notion of Kubrick as an unfeeling pessimist. Perhaps we should credit the source material: Based on a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler, whose gift for depicting “the inner lives of people” was praised by Kakutani, the film brought out Kubrick’s empathy and sincerity more than, say, Arthur C. Clarke. Here, in the last message he transmitted to moviegoers, Kubrick expressed a guarded but earnest optimism about his lead characters’ moral backbone.
Indeed, as Eyes Wide Shut opens, Bill and Alice Harford appear to be on solid footing. Bill has ascended the ranks of his profession, even winning the trust of a smooth-talking tycoon, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), while Alice contentedly tends to hearth and home. Scored incessantly to the festive yet melancholy sounds of a suite by Dmitri Shostakovich, the film revels in its domesticity: Alice goes over homework with their daughter; Bill keeps an eye on a football game on TV.
Of course, for much of its 159-minute running time, Bill and Alice are shuttled into scenes intended to tear asunder their bonds. At a party thrown at Ziegler’s mansion, Alice allows herself to be swirled around the dance floor by a Lothario, while Bill is tasked with reviving a drug-addicted prostitute in, of all places, the private bathroom of his host. Yet Kubrick shows these two holding fast to their upper-middle-class mores: Bill is clearly staggered by Ziegler’s licentiousness (if unwilling to challenge his mentor), while Alice ends her dance with the would-be pickup artist by protesting, “I’m married.”
Kubrick is no Pollyanna. Late one night, Alice is weirdly offended by Bill’s vote of confidence for her marital fidelity and tries her best to wound him. In a monologue delivered with cat-like precision by Kidman, Alice claims to have once been tempted to break her vows with a naval officer. Beckoned to attend to an expired patient’s family, Bill stays out past his bedtime. Fatefully, he encounters a woman who carries a torch for him, a sweet-natured prostitute, and various other assorted sleazebags before winding up at a masked orgy at which a murder seems to have been set in motion.
Kubrick’s camera inhales the contours of a city after dark: the shadows, the sparkling multicolored lights, the lonely passersby. Yet, to our great relief, neither Bill nor Alice actually stumble over the cliff of infidelity, or worse. In the unlikely setting of a toy store, a place overflowing with tokens of wonderment and innocence, Bill and Alice restate their affection and commit to march on with their marriage.
Perhaps Kubrick, who was married three times but was with his third and final wife, Christiane, for more than 40 years, was a believer in something after all, the gift of family and the grace of monogamy. Said his daughter Anya in an interview with Sight & Sound after his death: “He was a very nice, good, rather Jewish father — over-protective but not more so than many. He would always be there for us, and he was fantastic in a crisis.”
Frank Capra, he wasn’t. Just don’t call him cold.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review and Humanities.
