Eyes Wide Shut

It’s a shame the Kubrick had to go out with this, in my opinion, the least effective and least interesting of his later work. It has the Kubrick look, in every scene, but story is often his weakest point, and I had a very hard time getting involved in this one. I didn’t like much about these rich people, and Tom Cruise’s sexual odyssey didn’t hold a lot of interest for me. And, sadly, though some parts looked a lot better on my recent second viewing, some of it just looked worse.

In particular, the long middle part of the movie takes place in a vast mansion, big as any museum, and it’s pretty silly. Inside is a giant orgy, involving hundreds of people, spread out from room to room. There are hired women, all of them naked, but everyone else is cloaked and masked. They either stand around watching, or engage in silent, mechanical sex. Is this any way to run an orgy? I’d be bored out of my mind. Is the idea that these people are so jaded that they enjoy simply standing around quietly, passive, drugged, whatever? The Marquis de Sade wouldn’t choreograph an orgy this way. These are supposed to be insanely rich and unimaginably powerful people, so I kept wondering just who they were. The Knights Templar? Freemasons? The Tri-Lateral Commission? The International Jewish Conspiracy? That silly Agnus Dei group from The Da Vinci Code? (No, if it was Catholic higher-ups there would be a lot of naked little boys around.) I decided it was probably Skull and Bones, and that was George W. and Laura Bush up there on the balcony. Boola boola!