(3 of 5)
Kubrick needed to be at his best, for the story turns on a very thin dime. The night after a grand party, at which both husband and wife indulge in potentially dangerous flirtations, she taunts him about his relationships with his female patients and insists on burdening him with a tale of an encounter she had at a seaside resort, where she and a young naval officer eyed each other erotically. Nothing more than that happened, but she tells her husband, in language that is almost identical in novel and screenplay, "Had he called me--I thought--I could not have resisted him...and at the same time you were dearer to me than ever."
Cruise's William accepts this dubious reassurance but is haunted by powerfully lubricious visions of his wife making love to the officer as he goes about his night-time rounds in modern New York City, which Kubrick has substituted for Schnitzler's fin-de-siecle Vienna. The possibilities of relief--or should we call it revenge?--are everywhere: a newly dead patient's daughter comes on to William powerfully yet pathetically; a cheerful prostitute invites him to a casual coupling; and, finally, in the movie's central sequence, he succeeds in invading a secret orgy, where masked couples disport themselves sexually in a display that is more grim than wanton.
In all these encounters eros and thanatos are exquisitely mixed. The dead body of the first woman's father is clearly visible as she confesses her confused passion; the prostitute turns out to be under the threat of AIDS; the orgiasts, resenting William's intrusion on their saturnalia, threaten him with humiliation and death, and he is "redeemed" only by the intervention of a mysterious woman, who pays for his life with her own.
The orgy sequence, along with several others in the film, is full of naked (and mainly handsome) flesh. But as Christiane Kubrick says, "It has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with fear," and although this is the point Kubrick very obviously wanted to make, it may not be a point audiences want to take. Indeed, the deepest daring of Eyes Wide Shut lies in the way it keeps edging viewers toward a place they want very much to go (famous people making out before the camera, for example), then dashing those hopes. It is also a movie that, to put the matter bluntly, constantly edges right up to the thin line separating the emotionally persuasive from the risible, and one that at any moment in the process of (literally) fleshing out the novel's abstractions could dissolve into the unconsciously comical. That's the most obvious danger when your subject is not sex itself, where there are plenty of conventions to guide the filmmaker, but sex in the mind, for which there are very few precedents to guide him.
But Kubrick was used to that danger, even appeared to revel in it. Most of his pictures, whatever their genre roots, disappointed genre expectations, not to mention critical anticipation and occasionally the studio's box-office ambitions. As Eyes Wide Shut seeks to avoid those perils, it has something besides its considerable intrinsic merits going for it.