I finally saw Eyes Wide Shut last night, and wow, I have many thoughts. So many that I actually came over here to rant about it, and I haven’t done that for ages!
I would say that, overall, it’s not a very good movie—it’s slow (Kubrick!) and the characters aren’t especially engaging (more on that in a bit). However, there’s the glimmer of what could have been a good movie in it, which I guess is why I feel compelled to blather.
(And I shall blather in a highly spoilery fashion, so be warned.)
I’d say that this article sums up what Eyes Wide Shut does well: It is about class, money, and sexual exploitation. I feel like it’s strongest when it adheres to these themes—I particularly liked how it wound up, with the main character being told that, yeah, somebody died, but here’s a little story you can tell yourself to remain comfortable, and who cares even if we killed her, she was a nobody who was going to die anyway. It’s the essence of privilege served up on a platter, and I appreciated that he didn’t just swallow it whole. (Growth!)
Buuuut…. We’re gonna get into what it doesn’t do well.
It’s anachronistic, Part I. According to Wikipedia, the movie was based on a story written in the 1920s, set even earlier. “Kubrick obtained the filming rights for [the story] the 1960s, considering it a perfect text for a film adaptation about sexual relations.”
Unfortunately, the movie came out in 1999, and sexual knowledge, particularly in regard to women, had changed in the intervening decades. In the movie (and apparently the story) the main character is a man who is determined to cheat on his wife because he has learned that she had a sexual fantasy about leaving for another man. Once. Which she didn’t act on. Also, she had a sex dream.
OK? So, you’re an educated man—a medical doctor, even!—in 1999, you’ve been married for NINE YEARS, you have a kid, and…you lose your shit because your wife once had an escapist sexual fantasy and a sex dream.
I can see that in the 1920s or even the 1960s. I could maybe see it in 1999 if the man was very young and had been raised in a fundamentalist community or something. But there is literally no reason a 30-something man in 1999 should be shocked—shocked!—to discover that his wife has a fantasy life that is sexual in nature. Especially not a fucking doctor who has been married for a while—give me a break. (Did he get his M.D. from Liberty University or something?)
Setting the movie in 1999 made it very hard for me to get invested in the main character, because in that context he’s an idiot and a terrible husband, and I have trouble caring about The Adventures of an Immature Dipshit.
It’s anachronistic, Part II. Remember how they had a kid? Sometimes the movie forgets! It’s kind of like the DA’s family in Billions (only watched the first season, not watching the second) where the child magically vanishes after the witching hour, or maybe they put a padlock on the outside of the poor kid’s door. These people have a LOT more privacy in the bedroom than any parent I know, let’s put it that way.
The wife isn’t a very coherent character, either, which also feels dated—basically, she’s a collection of stereotyped female roles. She gets the action going in the first part of the movie by spending all her time drunk or stoned, because heaven forfend that a woman have meaningful agency. She magically sobers up for the second part of the movie so she can spend all her time piously being a Good Mom while her husband is out trying to cheat on her. (He almost never Dads, by the way, so add being a shitty father to the list of reasons why it’s hard for me to care about him.)
The sexual exploitation doesn’t stop with the characters. The last line in that movie? Oh, come on—you can practically see Kubrick rubbing one out.
There’s a lot of nudity in the movie, too, which is fine with me when it’s in the context of an orgy which (believe it or not) is actually really key to the plot and one of the better scenes. But can be jarringly gratuitous. Like, when the doctor’s patient gets topless for him to use a stethoscope? Seriously? I don’t remember ever being asked to do that. If that scene was supposed to be showing the main character as an inappropriate and shitty doctor, it should have been handled differently—the way it was shot was just: BOOBIES!!!
(The whole argument the doctor and his wife have about breast exams was just ridiculous, too. Clearly no one involved in the movie had ever actually gotten one. For the record, the doctor does not grope or grab your boobs—they use the fingers flat, thumb tucked away, and press around. The entire point is to make the exam as unlike an erotic experience as possible. The mammogram machine squeezes, hard, but the doctor does not.)
I find it really creepy and underhanded when a movie that is ostensibly about how bad X is indulges itself in X. It smacks of porn—but porn about how bad porn is! (Everyone who made this movie is a monster!!) Why bother? What’s the point, aside from letting us know that the Me Too movement didn’t come out of thin air?