Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5534 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-03-03
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 159 minutes

DVD Description
Sexual jolts disrupt Manhattan physician Bill Harford (Tom Cruise)'s equilibrium. At an elegant Christmas party, two models hit on him, he watches a Lothario try to pick up his tipsy wife, he aids a woman sprawled naked in a bathroom after an overdose. The next night, his wife (Nicole Kidman) reveals sexual fantasies with a stranger; a dead patient's daughter throws herself at him; as he walks, brooding, six teen boys hurl homophobic insults at him; a streetwalker takes him to her flat; he interrupts men having a sex party with a girl barely in her teens. His odyssey, which next takes him into a world of wealthy sex play at a masked ball of hedonism, threatens his life, his self-respect, and his marriage.

Special Features
Scene commentary by Sydney Pollack and Peter Loewenberg, the documentary The Last Movie: Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut, Interview with Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and Steven Spielberg, Kubrick award acceptance speech, Lost Kubrick: The Unfinished Films of Stanley Kubrick, and the Theatrical Trailer and TV Spots.

Synopsis
Stanley Kubrick's final film is a mature, highly intelligent, thrilling masterpiece of sexual obsession and marital (in)fidelity. Tom Cruise stars as Bill Harford, a doctor who becomes obsessed with a sexual fantasy that his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), confesses to him. Although the fantasy (involving a naval officer) occurred only in Alice's mind, Bill can't get it out of his own head; his obsession leads him through a series of potential sexual encounters, each one surrounded by the specter of death. His whole world threatens to unravel as he falls deeper and deeper into a web of mystery, lies, and deceit.
Kubrick's film breathes with vivid blues, reds, and blacks, the threat of illicit sex and death lurking around every corner. Cruise and Kidman, who are married in real life, are utterly convincing as a happy couple suddenly forced to reexamine their faith in each other. Sidney Pollack, Todd Field, Julienne Davis, Marie Richardson, and Vinessa Shaw sparkle in minor roles. Based on the novella TRAUMNOVELLE by Arthur Schnitzler, EYES WIDE SHUT is a brilliant examination of the psychological nature of sex and marriage, of faith and faithlessness, of obsession and desire. Kubrick said that his last film (he died shortly before the film opened) was 'my best film ever'; while that is debatable, there is no doubting that the film is a splendid finale to a glorious career.

Customer Reviews

The last words from a genius
"Eyes Wide Shut" is Stanley Kubrick's last film.

Like all Kubricks, "Eyes Wide Shut" is a film that appears on the surface to be relatively straightforward, yet isn't, if you want it to be. You take from it what you want. When I first saw it, I was disappointed. I was expecting genius. And yet, like the layers of a peeled orange, the more you look, the more you see.

Visually it's fabulous - the colours and textures of the film are sumptious. You can tell when you watch it this guy started off as a stills photographer. Like Barry Lyndon, each shot is framed like a painting.

In terms of plot, "Eyes Wide Shut" is fairly one-dimensional. On the surface it might seem like a fairly basic morality tale about the temptations of infidelity, but the translation of the title of the novella it is based on is "Dream Story" - little of "Eyes Wide Shut" actually happens. Hence then, the unusual dialogue, the bizarre imagery, and the strange-plot-arc.

You can pick this up in the unusual dialogue frequented by the longue lizard in the opening scene who attempts to seduce Alice (Nicole Kidman), or the gaggle of women who flirt outrageously with Bill (Tom Cruise), or the bereaved woman who attempts to seduce him. Bill literally exists in a world where all women are sexual, even those who are being examined for breast cancer suffer from an objection of their flesh, as Cruise examines them in a state of unnecessary nakedness.

If the film is 'real', highly unlikely given the circumstances, then, for example, why is everything so old-fashioned? Why is the hooker so... civilised, her dialogue so stilted, her language so repressed? Why do characters behave as if they were living in the 1940's, not the 1990's?

However, there are also some moments of richness. Who else has filmed a couple applying deodorant or brushing their teeth? Who else has penetrated the nature of relationships in such a successful manner in film? Eyes Wide Shut is about the way we act against what we think, about the essential deceptions we all carry within us and do not reveal, about the gap between our desires and our reality.

Hence the use of masks as a recurrent theme. Hence the fact that all male characters have two faces - for example, the masks, or the fear of losing their faces (many characters bemoan losing their hair - the frame around the face), and many of the female characters (Domino - literally one with two faces) are also two-faced. Decievers and decieved.

The other sub-plot is that of a world where the rich use and discard people who are of lesser importance. Bill is constantly buying people off, paying for services that are either not rendered, or over-paying for everything - the Taxi Driver, the Prostitute. This is probably something to do with the fact that wealth brings with it guilt, and by constantly 'forking out', he's trying to address the balance and pay off his middle or upper-class sense of guilt. With Wealth comes the knowledge everyone has a price.

To its logical extension, the people behind the debauched mansion sequence actually appear to gang-rape and drug a woman to death. Bill only survives because they do not want to kill him. Yet. If any of it is real.

So "Eyes Wide Shut". Not by any means an easy movie to love. But a great one. Like any Kubrick movie, it takes many repeated viewings and years of enjoyment to begin to unravel all the riches it has to reveal. A satisfying end to a career.

And hence the title Eyes Wide Shut is a deceptively shallow name for a film. But what does the phrase mean? In full knowledge of the darker side of human nature, in full awareness of the corruption at the heart of man (the use of money to buy anything, the corruption of power, the emptiness of sex which is a mere simulation of love), Bill / Alice choose to ignore the facts they are fully aware of, and try to live an ignorant life. In ignorance lies bliss. But it has a price. The couple no longer are innocent - the purity of their love has been broken. Alice's final suggestion is that the couple shag. Not make love. But sex, like base animals, like creatures who can no longer connect spiritually anymore. But do not yet know that all they are doing now is decieving themselves in an imitation. An imitation of what their love used to be.

Fascinating.
Well, I'm sure everyone has heard of or about this movie, but it's one that really needs to be seen with an open mind before it's judged.

While its tones and themes are sexual and images sometimes shocking, it's the undertones and the sub-text that really makes this movie worth watching.
It deals with power and the lack thereof, control, and - as alot of movies around the late nineties and early 2000s did - deals with emasculation. When a man doesn't feel like a man anymore, what happens to the dynamic of a marriage?

It really is fascinating stuff and I believe some of Kubricks greatest work. Also, the DVD comes with a whole disc of extras where you can really delve into the mind of Kubrick through interviews with the man himself, his family and also Tom and Nicole talk about making the film.

My Eyes Were Opened..
Disregard the cheesy title of this if you please, it as a mere filler - something many seem to accuse this film of possessing in abundance.
I personally find the many reviews of this film almost as equally intriguing as the film itself - ideas and views are sparse and varied in interpretations, which I'll admit helped compell me to check out this cinematic feast for myself..

Having viewed it, I find myself still in two midns about my recommendations towards it - on the one hand, it has some beautiful moments of real-life-captured-on-film-style dialogue (I am particular fan of the scene where Kidman becomes jealous over Cruise's trust of her, and how trust is what first begins to tear their seemingly perfect relationship apart). But the film itself was not without its flaws; whilst Kidman was fantastic in her role, Tom's performance seemed to vary in quality depending on the situation - his acitng ranging from decent and believably human, right down to gormlous git that would embaress Sylvester Stallone - all through the same scene.

Many would add the artificial streets into the criticisms, but I feel that it added a certain charm to it, a film that wasnt afraid to show its flaws. But the bit that really made this film crackle for me was the dialogue - in too many films today do we see dialogue being neglected for the visuals, but this film, I felt at least, was more in the leagues of a Kevin Smith movie. And that's no bad thing.

If you are open minded and don't mind a slow pace where the film will often step aside from the action for a sampling of a little more human interaction, then I would recommend this piece of cinema.