By Zanny Begg
You could keep your eyes shut during Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and not miss much. The meandering three-hour-long film is boring. So mild and boring it is hard to image how it earned its R rating.
True, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman smoke a joint, contemplate infidelity, get naked and fuck. But the film doesn't really live up to the advertising hype that surrounded its release nor deserve its classification.
Essentially Eyes Wide Shut is a cautionary tale on infidelity. When Dr Bill Harford (Cruise) is told by his slightly bored wife Alice (Kidman) that she fantasised about seducing a naval officer, his jealousy drives him to set out to have an affair of his own.
Bill begins his moral decent by contemplating having sex with the daughter of one of his patients. But her fiancé turns up and spoils the moment. He then does a long James Dean impersonation walking the boulevard of broken dreams with grainy images of his wife having sex with men in uniforms running through his head.
His melancholy is interrupted, however, by a sex worker who invites him back to her room. But the beautiful moment is again interrupted, this time by a phone call from Alice. His conscience pricked, he leaves.
Bill's moral decline enters a sharper descent when he gatecrashes an orgy organised by a super-rich weird cult. The viewer is subjected to a long, very dull, orgy full of gratuitous female nudity with fleeting lesbian references (intended for the fully clothed male voyeurs) with lots of black capes, masks and ominous music.
After a night of darkness the doctor returns to the family unit — his affair unconsummated. But the crime of infidelity, according to Eyes Wide Shut, is not in the act, but the desire. So the last part of the film deals with the consequences of Bill's dalliance; almost all of the women he contemplated having sex with end up fatally ill or dead.
Although questionable, the moral content of the film could have been interesting — if it did not star Tom Cruise. Cruise manages to be both wooden and cheesy. He lacks any dark side which could have made his moral dilemma convincing or engaging. He just flashes his trademark smile and goes on being Tom Cruise regardless of how bizarre or frightening his predicament gets.
In contrast, Kidman is fantastic as the bored wife, but unfortunately she barely appears in the film. Eyes Wide Shut is long and superficial. As a suspense film — suspense is just what it lacked. It won't be the film Kubrick is remembered for.