Eyes Wide Shut

REVIEW
Cruise and Kidman are William and Alice Harford, a physically beautiful, emotionally stunted, psychologically impaired couple living in opulence in New York City. He is a top-dollar doctor, she once ran an art gallery; their outward veneer of perfection covers an essential, existential emptiness. They are buffeted by insecurities, adrift without internal moorings, morally inept. William finds himself drawn into an underground world of sexual excess while obsessed by his wife's disclosure of an unfulfilled fantasy -- a fantasy that becomes as real to him as his waking life. He crashes a party to find a ritual mass of depravity, precipitating a series of events that seem to threaten his very life. Kubrick has crafted an exploration of how our internal lives conform our perception of reality, warping our view of the world to mirror our lust and shame and fear. In his final opus, the director utilizes to great effect his signature, striking visual imagery in constructing a mystery both visceral and abstract. The film requires attention and is sometimes slow-moving; but it is ultimately most rewarding as it choreographs the interplay between sex and death, love and need. Cruise and Kidman deliver solid, nuanced performances, alternately somnambulistic and raw, as the two naifs adrift in a world of sexual obsession. The ending is ambiguous: Has William reached the end of a fever dream or merely made a convenient adjustment to forces outside his control? Or is it simply our fate as humans to go through life with our eyes wide shut?