Something curious happened in New York around Christmastime 2016. For a few weeks, most of the rep houses in the city were screening Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. The director’s final film had become, somehow, a holiday staple. This was a fate no one could have predicted back in July 1999, when it was released to dismissive reviews and disappointing box office, owing in part to a fully revved-up Hollywood hype machine that touted the sex appeal of stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and prepared audiences for a much different film.
But look hard enough at this tale of an embittered husband seeking sex in the wake of his wife’s admission of adulterous longing, and you can sense a familiar structure. Cruise’s Bill Harford wanders a nocturnal landscape of potential transgressions, all of which remind him of the warmth of domestic life. Or, to put it another way: Eyes Wide Shut may have been based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 Traumnovelle (“Dream Story”), but it also plays like a sex-drenched variation on It’s a Wonderful Life, a warning to its protagonist to learn to appreciate his lot in life and love.
- Vulture
