Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic drama film directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick. Based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story), the story is transferred from early 20th-century Vienna to 1990s New York City. The film follows the sexually charged adventures of Dr. Bill Harford, who is shocked when his wife, Alice, reveals that she had contemplated having an affair a year earlier. He embarks on a night-long adventure, during which he infiltrates a massive masked orgy of an unnamed secret society.

Kubrick obtained the filming rights for Dream Story in the 1960s, considering it a perfect text for a film adaptation about sexual relations. He revived the project only in the 1990s, when he hired writer Frederic Raphael to help him with the adaptation. The film, which was mostly shot in the United Kingdom, apart from some exterior establishing shots, includes a detailed recreation of exterior Greenwich Village street scenes made at Pinewood Studios. The film's production, at 400 days, holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous film shoot.

Kubrick died six days after showing his final cut to Warner Bros., making the film his final directorial effort.[4] To ensure a theatrical R rating in the United States, Warner Bros. digitally altered several sexually explicit scenes during post-production. This version was released on July 16, 1999, to moderately positive reactions from critics; worldwide takings at the box office amounted to $162 million. The uncut version has since been released in DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray Disc formats.

Plot
Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and Alice (Nicole Kidman) are a young married couple living in New York. They attend a Christmas party hosted by a wealthy patient, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), where Bill is reunited with Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), a medical school drop-out who now plays piano professionally. While a Hungarian man named Sandor Szavost (Sky du Mont) attempts to seduce Alice, two young models attempt the same with Bill. He is interrupted by his host who had been having sex with Mandy (Julienne Davis), a young woman who has overdosed on a speedball. Mandy recovers with Bill's aid.

The following evening at home, while smoking marijuana, Alice asks him if he had sex with the two girls and Bill reassures her that he had not. She inquires if he is jealous of men who are attracted to her. He thinks women are more faithful than men. She tells him of a fantasy she had about a naval officer they had met on vacation. Disturbed by Alice's revelation, Bill is called by the daughter of a patient who has just died. The distraught daughter tries to seduce Bill, but he declines. After visiting the home, he goes to a prostitute named Domino (Vinessa Shaw), but Alice phones as Domino begins to kiss Bill. He then has a change of heart and leaves, paying Domino though they did not have sex. Meeting Nick at the jazz club, Bill learns that Nick has an engagement where he must play piano blindfolded. Bill learns that to gain admittance, one needs a costume, a mask, and the password, which Nick had written down. Bill goes to a costume shop and offers the owner, Mr. Milich (Rade Šerbedžija), a generous amount of money to rent a costume. In the shop, Milich catches his teenage daughter (Leelee Sobieski) with two Japanese men and expresses outrage at their lack of decency.

Bill takes a taxi to the country mansion mentioned by Nick. He gives the password and discovers a sexual ritual is taking place. A woman warns him he is in terrible danger. A porter then takes him to the ritual room, where a disguised red-cloaked master of ceremonies confronts Bill. The masked woman who had tried to warn Bill intervenes and insists that she will redeem him. Bill is ushered from the mansion and warned not to tell anyone about what happened there.

Just before dawn, Bill arrives home guilty and confused. He finds Alice laughing loudly in her sleep and awakens her. While crying, she tells him of a troubling dream in which she was having sex with the naval officer and many other men, and laughing at the idea of Bill seeing her with them. Later that morning, Bill searches for Nick. At Nick's hotel, the desk clerk (Alan Cumming) tells Bill that a bruised and frightened Nick checked out a few hours earlier after returning with two large, dangerous-looking men. Bill goes to return the costume, but not the mask, which he has misplaced, and learns Milich has sold his daughter into prostitution.

After reading a newspaper story about a beauty queen who died of a drug overdose, Bill views the body at the morgue and identifies it as Mandy. Bill is summoned to Ziegler's house, where Ziegler discloses he was one of those involved with the ritual orgy, and identified Bill and his connection with Nick. Ziegler claims the warnings made against Bill by the society are only intended to scare him from speaking about the orgy. However, he implies the society is capable of acting on their threats. Bill asks about the death of Mandy, whom Ziegler has identified as the masked woman at the party who'd "sacrificed" herself to prevent Bill's punishment, and about the disappearance of Nick, the piano player. Ziegler insists that Nick is safely back at his home in Seattle. Ziegler also says the "punishment" was a charade by the secret society to further frighten Bill, and it had nothing to do with Mandy's death; she was a hooker and addict and had died from another accidental drug overdose. Bill does not know whether Ziegler is telling the truth about Nick's disappearance or Mandy's death.

When he returns home, Bill finds the rented mask on his pillow next to his sleeping wife. He breaks down in tears and decides to tell Alice the whole truth of the past two days. The next morning, they go Christmas shopping with their daughter. Alice muses that they should be grateful that they have survived, that she loves him and there is something they must do as soon as possible, "Fuck."

Cast

 * Tom Cruise as Dr. William "Bill" Harford
 * Nicole Kidman as Alice Harford
 * Sydney Pollack as Victor Ziegler
 * Todd Field as Nick Nightingale
 * Marie Richardson as Marion Nathanson
 * Sky du Mont as Sandor Szavost
 * Rade Šerbedžija as Mr. Milich
 * Vinessa Shaw as Domino
 * Fay Masterson as Sally
 * Alan Cumming as Hotel Desk Clerk
 * Leelee Sobieski as Milich's daughter
 * Leon Vitali as Red Cloak
 * Julienne Davis as Mandy
 * Carmela Marner as Waitress at Gillespie's

Development
While Stanley Kubrick was interested in making a film about sexual relations as early as 1962, during production of Dr. Strangelove,[citation needed] the project only took off after he read Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story in 1968, when he was seeking a work to follow 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick got interested in adapting the story, and with the help of then-journalist Jay Cocks, bought the filming rights to the novel.[5] In the 1970s, Kubrick had thought of Woody Allenas the Jewish protagonist.[6] For the following decade, Kubrick even considered making his Dream Story adaptation a sex comedy "with a wild and somber streak running through it", starring Steve Martin in the main role.[7] The project was only revived in 1994, when Kubrick hired Frederic Raphael to work on the script, updating the setting from early 20th century Vienna to late 20th century New York City.[citation needed] Kubrick invited Michael Herr, a personal friend who helped write Full Metal Jacket, for revisions, but Herr declined for fear that he would both be underpaid and would commit to an overlong production.[7]

Adaptation
Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Dream Story is set around Vienna shortly after the turn of the century. The main characters are a couple named Fridolin and Albertina; their home is a typical suburban middle-class home, not the film's posh urban apartment. Schnitzler himself, like the protagonist of this novel, lived in Vienna, was Jewish, and a medical doctor, though Schnitzler eventually abandoned medicine for writing.

While Fridolin and Albertina, the protagonist couple of Dream Story, are sometimes implied to be Jewish, there is nothing in the novella which justifies this assumption, and neither Fridolin nor Albertina are typical Jewish names; whereas Nachtigall (Nightingale) is overtly identified as Jewish. Kubrick (himself of Jewish descent) frequently removed references to the Jewishness of characters in the novels he adapted.[8] In the case of Eyes Wide Shut, Frederic Raphael (who is also Jewish) wanted to keep the Jewish background of the protagonists, but Kubrick insisted that they should be "vanilla" Americans, without any details that would arouse any presumptions. The director added that Bill should be a "Harrison Ford-ish goy" (though Ford's mother was Jewish), and created the surname of Harford as an allusion to the actor.[9] This is reflected in the way the film's Bill Harford is taunted by college students when going home in the morning. In the film, Bill is taunted with homophobic slurs. In the novella, these boys are recognized to be members of an anti-Semitic college fraternity.[8][10] Kubrick's co-screenwriter, Frederic Raphael, in an introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of Dream Story, writes "Fridolin is not declared to be a Jew, but his feelings of cowardice, for failing to challenge his aggressor, echo the uneasiness of Austrian Jews in the face of Gentile provocation."[11]

The novella is set during the Carnival, when people often wear masks to parties. The party that both husband and wife attend at the opening of the story is a Carnival Masquerade ball, whereas the film's story begins at Christmas time.

Critic Randy Rasmussen suggests that the character of Bill is fundamentally more naïve, strait-laced, less disclosing and more unconscious of his vindictive motives than his counterpart, Fridolin.[12] For Rasmussen and others, the film's Bill Harford is essentially sleep-walking through life with no deeper awareness of his surroundings. In the novella, when his wife discloses a private sexual fantasy, he in turn admits one of his own (of a girl in her mid to late teens), while in the film he is simply shocked. The film's argument over whether he has fantasies over female patients and whether women have sexual fantasies is simply absent from the novella, where both husband and wife assume the other has fantasies. In the film, Bill's estrangement from Alice revolves around her confessing a recent fantasy to him; in the novella, both exchange fantasies, after which she declares that in her youth she could have easily married someone else, which is what precipitates their sense of estrangement.

In the novella, the husband long suspected that his patient (Marion) was infatuated with him, while in the film it is a complete surprise and he seems shocked. He is also more overwhelmed by the orgy in the film than in the novella. Fridolin is socially bolder but less sexual with the prostitute (Mizzi in the novella, Domino in the film). Fridolin is also conscious of looking old in the novella, though he hardly does in the film.

In the novella, the party (which is sparsely attended) uses "Denmark" as the password for entrance; that is significant in that Albertina had her infatuation with her soldier in Denmark. The film's password is "Fidelio", from the Latin word for "faithful", and which is the title of Beethoven's only opera (Fidelio, or Married Love). In early drafts of the screenplay, the password was "Fidelio Rainbow". Jonathan Rosenbaum noted that both passwords echo elements of one member of the couple's behaviour, though in opposite ways.[13] The party in the novella consists mostly of nude ballroom dancing.

In the novella, the woman who "redeems" Fridolin at the party, saving him from punishment, is costumed as a nun, and most of the characters at the party are dressed as nuns or monks; Fridolin himself used a monk costume. This aspect was retained in the film's original screenplay,[14] but was deleted in the filmed version.

In the novella, when the husband returns home, the wife's dream is an elaborate drama that concludes with him getting crucified in a village square after Fridolin refuses to separate from Albertina and become the paramour of the village princess, even though Albertina is now occupied with copulating with other men, and watches him "without pity". By being faithful, Fridolin thus fails to save himself from execution in Albertina's dream, although he was apparently spared by the woman's "sacrifice" at the masked sex party. In both the novella and film, the wife states that the laugh in her sleep just before she woke was a laugh of scornful contempt for her husband; although awake, she states this matter-of-factly. The novella makes it clear that Fridolin at this point hates Albertina more than ever, thinking they are now lying together "like mortal enemies". It has been argued that the dramatic climax of the novella is actually Albertina's dream, and the film has shifted the focus to Bill's visit to the secret society's orgy, whose content is more shocking in the film.[15]

The adaptation created a character with no counterpart in the novella: Ziegler, who represents both the high wealth and prestige to which Bill Harford aspires, and a connection between Bill's two worlds (his regular life, and the secret society organizing the ball).[16] Critic Randy Rasmussen interprets Ziegler as representing Bill's worst self, much as in other Kubrick films; the title character in Dr. Strangelove represents the worst of the American national security establishment, Charles Grady represents the worst of Jack Torrance in The Shining, and Clare Quilty represents the worst of Humbert Humbert in Lolita.[17]

Ziegler's presence allows Kubrick to change the mechanics of the story in a few ways. In the film, Bill first meets his piano-playing friend at Ziegler's party, and then while wandering around town, seeks him out at the Sonata Café. In the novella, the café encounter with Nightingale is a delightful coincidence. Similarly, the dead woman whom Bill suspects of being the woman at the party who saved him is a baroness that he was acquainted with earlier, not a hooker at Ziegler's party.

More significantly, in the film, Ziegler gives a commentary on the whole story to Bill, including an explanation that the party incident, where Bill is apprehended, threatened, and ultimately redeemed by the woman's sacrifice, was staged. Whether this is to be believed or not, it is an exposition of Ziegler's view of the ways of the world as a member of the power elite.[18]

The novella explains why the husband's mask is on the pillow next to his sleeping wife, she having discovered it when it slipped out of his suitcase, and placing it there as a statement of understanding. This is left unexplained in the film and left to the viewer's interpretation.

Casting
When Warner Bros. president Terry Semel approved production, he asked Kubrick to cast a movie star, as "you haven't done that since Jack Nicholson [in The Shining]".[5] Cruise was in England because his wife Nicole Kidman was there shooting The Portrait of a Lady, and eventually Cruise decided to visit Kubrick's estate with Kidman. After that meeting, the director awarded them the roles.[19] Jennifer Jason Leigh and Harvey Keitel each were cast and filmed by Kubrick. Due to scheduling conflicts, both had to drop out[20] – first Keitel with Finding Graceland,[21] then Leigh with eXistenZ[22] – and they were replaced by Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson in the final cut.[5]