Director Set: the Kubrick Rubric

Perhaps my favourite podcast over the past few years is Blank Check with Griffin and David, which finds actor Griffin Newman and critic David Sims covering the entire filmography of a director (one film per episode) specifically those who were given a blank check at some point in their career to make whatever passion project they want.  It's an entertaining, inviting, insightful, thoughtful and incredibly well researched podcast which goes into deep (and sometimes juvenile) conversations about the director and actors and productions of the films they cover, frequently to the point where the podcast episodes are longer than the films.  Their latest series parsed through the career of Stanley Kubrick.

A few years back (quite a few years back now) the TiFF Lightbox Theatre held a Kubrick retrospective, playing most (if not all) of his films over about a month span and hosting a gallery of memorabilia and personal collection materials.  Of the films, I saw only 2001: A Space Odyssey projected on the screen, but I did go through both the gallery, and the archival space (many many floors up) which housed records and archival materials on Kubrick's failed projects (particularly Napoleon).  

I'm not exactly certain why I felt the need to explore these things.  As much as 2001 is a seriously deep-rooted film for me (as a sci-fi nerd), it's not like I'd ever been an avid Kubrick follower.  Truth told, before this Blank Check dive into the director, I had seen only 4 of his films, and of them only 2001 had inspired me in any way.  But exiting through the gift shop at the Lightbox, I spied Warner Brothers' "Stanley Kubrick: The Masterpiece Collection" blu-ray set, which I price checked on Amazon and bought on the cheap, if only for that inevitable time when I would want to sit down and really dive into Kubrick.  Much to my chagrin, the set did not include Spartacus (which was a feature film of a different podcast series - though I did manage to catch the film on TMC, minus the last 20 minutes due to a PVR cutoff), nor did the set contain any of Kubrick's films pre-Spartacus.  No Paths of Glory, no The Killing, nor Killer's Kiss or Fear and Desire.  These I would have to try to come to on my own.

I skipped 1953's Fear and Desire despite this being the most readily available of any of Kubrick's films on streaming (Amazon, Tubi, Hoopla, Fandor and more services I've never heard of), mainly out of timing.

Killer's Kiss (1955 - Tubi) is not a memorable film in Kubrick's pantheon.  It's been 3 months and I can't even recall the set-up of the story without prompts.  It's a film that feels like very rudimentary Kubrick in structure and storytelling, yet Kubrick nonetheless. It's his stab at neo-noir at a point where the genre is just starting to wane.   Kubrick films are known for having such mastery over their score or song selection.  This film would be so much better if all the music were diagetic (and some of it is). Otherwise, the score can often be overbearing.  Stanley's use of media, often a huge part of his films, seems to start here with one of the better uses in any film of a media commentator spilling exposition.

The film involves an aging boxer falling for a girl who is under the thumb of her clubowner boss.  The two plot an escape from New York together, after one last boxing match, then they leave their shitty lives behind.  Of course, plans don't always work out.  It's not a deep plot, and unlike Kubrick's later film's this is mainly just a story, without much to really say.

The boxing sequence is complete garbage in terms of fight choreography, but Kubrick's shooting and editing of the fight is goddamn electric.  It doesn't cover up the terrible sparring, but it does still create energy.  The film's leads, Jamie Smith and Irene Kane may not be the best actors (all the dubbing doesn't help their performances any), but man, they are intriguing to look at and Kubrick loves lingering on them both.  Finding intriguing faces and just letting them inhabit a frame is a Kubrick hallmark. 

The first 50 of the film are a little plodding, all set up of the relationship between the boxer and the singer, but the last 20 minutes are absolutely cracking, culminating in a foot chase that just spectacular, beautifully composed. Something about Kubrick's framing of the chase makes the setting look so alien, so unreal, expansive and expensive, especially in striking black and white.  The foot chase leads to the final fight, equally amazing, just so two desperate men wildly flailing about with sharp and/or pokey things, tossing mannequin limbs and torsos at each other. You would figure a boxer would have better fighting skills...then again, they established that he's not a good boxer.  If the film stands out for any reason, it's this 20 minute stretch.

Following Killer's Kiss up with The Killing (1956) we find Kubrick's obsession with procedure taking shape. It's the story of a veteran criminal, played by Sterling Hayden, now deeply in love, wanting to escape his nefarious New York life with his new belle.  He has a plan to rob a race track, and he's got the process figured out, all he needs are the people. As much as Kubrick loves the set-up here, he's really highlighting that it's not plans that are flawed, but people, and if ever a plan fails to work it's typically the human factor that can't be accounted for, ever.

As Hayden begins to assemble his crew, we keenly aware that his entire plan hinges on an inside man, a teller at the race track, who is utterly hen-pecked and cuckolded by his domineering wife.  He's a small, insecure man, and his need to hang on to what little (completely faked) doting and affection she has for him, results in him disclosing the plan.  As a result she tips off her thug lover and they plan to hit Hayden and company after they pull off the heist.

The heist itself is underwhelming, and somehow Kubrick's editing doesn't quite pull it together into something exciting or overly tense.  I don't know that I was ever really rooting for it to go off without a hitch, and it really only becomes interesting because it starts to fall apart, but even then, not in anything entirely dramatic.  It all seems kind of mundane.  Part of it may be that Hayden is not a very captivating performer.  He's not a bad actor, but he's not an exciting one either, and Kubrick seems to have a sort of detachment from really capturing him in any emotional light, so if we root for him, it's as our default protagonist.

Part of the heist involves a very broad, hairy Italian distracting the security guards at the track bar, and it's a speed-ramped, absurdly orchestrated sequence in which the performer (Tito Vuolo) gets his shirt ripped off, and he picks up, spins around and throws men like they're in a wrestling ring.  It's easily the worst scene of the film, but Vuolo provides an interesting scene earlier in the film where this thick-accented man has to deliver basically the most insightful, thoughtful dialogue about the condition of being a criminal. 

The film ends memorably, as Kubrick films are want to do, with a turn of the screw.

Paths of Glory (1957) was actually the last film I watched, due to accessibility.  I wound up picking up a used DVD (yes, DVD!) a few weeks back, but not really finding the time to watch it.  It's the freshest film in memory.  It's also a quantum leap in the material Kubrick would tackle from his first three films.  

Where The Killing and Killer's Kiss (again, can't speak to Fear and Desire) were really pulpy, noirish crime films, without much to say beyond the immediate story being told, Paths of Glory announces itself pretty early on as a visiting French General strolls through his trenches in the middle of the first World War, his outfit pristine compared to all the beleaguered, muddy and bloody men living there, gladhanding and token gesturing to the troops, revelling in his toady Major's accolades about how much the men respect and admire him for his presence.  It's reminiscent of King Arthur strolling through a peasant town in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "'ow do y'know 'ee's a king." "'ee 'asn't got shit allover 'im".

Then when the General dictates to Kirk Douglas' Colonel Dax that the next they they would be assailing the "Anthill", and extremely off-handedly commenting on the immense loss of life, and dismissing the impracticality of the plan, we realize that the General's earliest lies to his own boss, about how much he cares for each individual man in his regiment (men who have won significant victories for him in the past), we realize it's artifice and bullshit.  It's posturing for politics, respect and position.

When the next day's assault goes horribly wrong, the first wave almost entirely slaughtered, and the second wave stalling in the trenches, the General feels embarrassment that his men didn't succeed or lay dead on the battlefield.  Someone has to pay, and it's not going to be him.  He forces Colonel Dax to pick out men who will pay, with their lives, for desertion of duty.  They will be tried, found guilty and face a firing squad.  Dax, in a prior life a respected trial attorney, acts as lawyer to the defendants, but it's a kangaroo court, whose only purpose is to find the men guilty, not entertain any other discussion.

Paths of Glory taken together with Full Metal Jacket is Kubrick getting to the heart of how dehumanizing war is. Both films exhibit this fully on their own, but together they form a cinematic treatise on the inhumanizing nature of war.

The final moments of Paths of Glory are its most potent -- after a harrowing battle sequence that was never likely to succeed, and the infuriating kangaroo court trial to scapegoat innocent soldiers for the debacle -- there's a sequence where a barroom full of soldiers are ravenous for some form of burlesque, and a frightened, tearful German woman is dragged up on the stage as a "spoil of war"...but as a warm up she is commanded to sing, and her soulful (if underwhelming) voice, choking back sobs, is enough to remind the men that there is still humanity, in the enemy, and even in them.

I think if Kubrick made Paths of Glory later in his career, the Kirk Douglas character would be more enigmatic and less of a central figure for the audience to rally behind, as he attempts to fight the elite leaders and their willingness to throw anyone in the line of fire if it means more accolades, prosperity and status for them. Kubrick would let these figures reveal themselves without the need for a voice to identify them (but then 1950's film was quite different from 1970s film in terms of audience expectations). 

It's a film with a few overly melodramatic moments, but potent in its message.  It's not just anti-war, but also a dismantling of hierarchies and class structures.  Subjects he will incorporate in his films again and again.

I wished to return to Spartacus (1960) once more but, time and access got in the way.  The first film of "The Masterpiece Collection" is Lolita (1962) an icky little film that its defenders will posit as a dark comedy, with the innuendo slathered on thicker than the mayonnaise on Lolita's sandwiches.

Few movies have made me feel as unclean as often as Lolita, mainly ( but not only) from watching an ogre leer and obsess over (and journal about and narrate and manipulate and control) a 16-year-old. At times it seems like Kubrck is equally obsessed and leering.

I find the early family and social dynamics of the story very fascinating and, often, entertaining. If James Mason were instead a callous, curious, and queer onlooker (he seems halfway there already, particularly in the way he rebuffs the landlady Winters' advances) and maybe Lolita were instead a college-aged boy, it could very much be a Power of the Dog situation. Alas, this isn't remotely as sharp as Campion's masterpiece.

I'm not much of an admirer of Peter Sellers. His schtick is a precursor to Robin Williams' most tiresome impulses, and he seems incapable of delivering anything related to a natural performance in this film. He's rather unbearable, and not just because his character is supposed to be a creepy pervert...and part of a Boris and Natasha-esque duo of cartoon villains .

Mason is, for the most part, a corny, clumsy actor in the role, his emoting beyond over the top. There's no inner narrative happening in his performance, no sense of conflict at all. Yes, he's a malicious, manipulative predator (yet a campy villain compared to Sellers' cartoon evil) but there's little sense of awareness, of himself or his behaviour, in his performance, no sense of right or wrong, and especially no inner conflict. 

That the film even attempts to insinuate Lolita as possibly a conniving manipulator and not the victim in all that's happened to her is its most vile trick. There something deeply misogynistic about it.

What was with the weird interlude of cot-related slaptick? It seemed intensly out of place. Add to that the bizarre Sellers' performances, that early Benny Hill-esque montage, "Humbert Humbert" (?!), and that ridiculous one-line epilogue, it's like Kubrick thought this work, largely about sexual predators, is somehow a comedy?

A product of it's time, it's utterly dependent on understanding how little regard people paid to women and girls in its time, defering always to whatever explanation a man gives about any situation. It doesn't care at all about its title character, nor have any interest in giving us any true glimpse of what her world or inner life is (for that would spoil the Quilty reveal which, if you're paying attention, was spelled out from the beginning). It's pretty abhorrent the lack of anything regarding investment in this poor girl, who seems to be just trying to figure out a way to survive all the neglect and abuse she's suffered... something that should be made far more plain but never is. In this regard, it's especially distasteful if Kubrick were attempting comedy.

It's not that this movie pushes buttons. It's not provokative, it's just a bloated, bad movie. I have to wonder if this was at least some of the inspiration for Laura Palmer's tragic tale in Twin Peaks. Leland Palmer does look a lot like Humbert Humbert. 

Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) (1964) I first watched a little over 15 years ago as my then girlfriend (now wife) picked it out as a film I needed to see.  I saw it.  I didn't get it.  Perhaps I was just more into my ladyfriend than the movie at the time.

I certainly got it this time around, a pitch black comedy about the end of the world, drawn out in exacting bureaucratic detail (though at a certain point the button pushing and switch flipping did start to drag on the pacing).

Sellers, in two of his three roles, is asked to play the straight man, and he works exceptionally well in those, particularly when he's playing straight man to the other side of a phone conversation we never hear. Strangelove is over the top, clearly a Nazi scientist granted employment by the Americans, but also possessed by a Nazi demon hand? It's weird and mostly funny, but Sellers does have a tendency to push his bits one beat too far when given free reign to do so.

The best comedic performance goes to George C. Scott, and a brief scan of his IMDB profile reveals, sadly, no other comedic roles. The excessive gum chewing, that little squeak of joy in his bravado, the cooing dovetalk to his secretary/mistress, and going big with the emoting, all coalesce in an amazing, and unexpected, comedic turn. General Turgidson is a cheeky lampooning of the expected military leader tropes, bored and neutered by the Cold War.

Strangelove is the first of Kubrick's films to be hyperfocused on static shots composed like photographs, to really structure his film as set pieces around these compositions. It's his most visually striking black-and-white film, and shows a shift from utilizing existing sets to constructing his own to accomplish his vision.  It's also another in his string of anti-war films (which about half his films have some element of this statement... even 2001 had an anti-war plot element excised).

 What's left to say about 2001:A Space Odyssey (1968)? It's not without flaws, few thought they are, but over half a century later it's still one of the most unique cinematic artifacts and a viewing experience unlike  any other.  Many have tried to replicate the beauty, tranquility, and intensity of Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's pensive inquiry into "what's possibly out there" --  masters of cinema like Stephen Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Robert Zemeckis, Brian De Palma, and Christopher Nolan -- and none have come close to delivering an experience like 2001.  

2001 retains every element of its beauty, mystery, intensity and head-trippy-ness that it's always had.  Its mystique and allure have never left it.  It's partly because it's the first film in which Kubrick detaches almost entirely from the emotional investment of storytelling, and instead explores the curiosity of man.  

I recall the first time I saw the film. I found it utterly impenetrable.  I followed up that viewing with reading Clarke's prose version of the story, which reads like a very straightforward and spelled out science-fiction epic, that borders on -- but never crosses -- demystifying the film.  Instead of spilling its secrets, it actually enhanced my second viewing experience (which immediately followed reading the book).  Each subsequent viewing, I lose some of the specifics of the novel, as the power and majesty of the film take over, but just knowing there's a foundation to it all, that there's actual meaning backing it up makes everything about 2001 potable.  Not just potable...fit for savouring, richly satisfying and digestible. Of all Kubrick's films, this will be the one I keep returning to most often and certain be keen to revisit on the big screen as often as possible.

This was my second viewing of A Clockwork Orange, having watched, and vehemently disliked, the first viewing at a midnight screening over 25 years ago. It was never a film I wished to revisit, but since I'm following along with the Blank Check podcast's film-by-film assessment of Kubrick, well... I do like a cinematic exercise.

As we're supposed to, I find the opening 20 minutes of the film vehemently unpleasant, to the point of recoiling and verging on turning the damn thing off. The ultra-violence, the rape, the hypersexualized art is all deeply uncomfortable and doubly so due to Kubrick's lens' almost perverse attraction towards it all. It's trying to make this all seem so very, very stylish, interesting and complete counter-culture. It's this ogling nod of approval towards all this anarchy and perversion is what really puts me off, mainly because I know there are people out there really getting off on all this. I don't believe it's Kubrick's intent for people to get off on it, but when you do something like this with such craft and vision, it's going to be appealing to some, who then want to bring it out into the world even further. I don't want to say it's a dangerous film, but it has the appearance of danger and that excites some people in all the wrong ways. And not just the type of people who think its cool to dress up as Alex for Halloween (I was in Spirit's Halloween store this past month and sure enough, there was the ol' Droog costume).

Once Alex is arrested it comes clear that the film is a satire, but I'm just not sure what of. The religious and rigid authority figures Alex encounters all seem straight out of Monty Python, sans jokes. There's some form of message in Alex's torturous reconditioning, his subsequently limp travails back into society where he basically faces everyone he wronged in the first 20 minutes, and his "rehabilitation" back to his former self for political posturing.... There's some form of message, but it's all kind of lost on me, and I know I'm not alone.

Kubrick, for all his control, doesn't seem to have control of the message he's sending. My first take, the take that I lived with for over 25 years, was that this film's main point is "anarchy is awesome" (something I don't agree with...I'm more of an "anarchy is sometimes necessary" type). After this second, more open-minded viewing -- with expectations already in place -- I see it's more than just that, but I'm not entirely sure what else it is, and the reality is, it's not an enjoyable film to think about so I don't spend much time thinking about it.

It's an exaggeration of society, a satire that still has resonance within today's culture.  There's a perpetual cycle of societal norms and youthful rebellion, a desire of elders to enforce conformity and for youth to break it.  This just takes both to their extremes in often repugnant ways.

But, generally, I'm not a fan and I still feel like I'm on the outside of truly appreciating it.

Here's what I knew of Barry Lyndon before first, recent, viewing:

- Kubrick shot it completely with natural lighting
- it's a period piece
- it's a long one
- possibly beautiful, possibly boring
- it stars Ryan O'Neal, whom it's been catalogued, is a huge piece of shit of a human being.

What I learnt while I watched:

- it IS kinda boring, but mainly in the way I find most period pieces of this bloomers and corsets type to be kinda boring.
- it's got a very dry sense of humour which I like, but the pacing kind of obfuscates its hilarities. There a proto-Wes Anderson vibe to all this, like it's the sole influence on Anderson and his sense of humour... but it's just not as swiftly entertaining as any of Anderson's films
- I watched with the subtitles on, and, strangely, the subtitles take extensive liberties with the dialogue. I'd say over 70% of the lines feature some change to what is actually being said
- The film is set in Ireland to start...and Ryan O'Neal may be of Irish heritage but he cannae do an accent for piss.  

If Barry Lyndon failed to entrance me, it's partly because it's overlong, and in need of a punch-up edit, really tightening it up for the humourous aspects.  The other aspect is I find it to be a film quite distanced from its main character.  We're right in the thick of Kubrick's 100 takes filmmaking philosophy, where he just keeps shooting scenes over and over and over.  Part of the point, I suspect, is to drum out any sense of acting out of the performer and attempt to will them into some form of exhaustion.  At the very least he seemed to have beaten O'Neal into a very confused state, which works for Barry's often perplexed, often overwhelmed, yet working-through-it demeanour.  At the same time I think that all those takes wind up making for an inconsistent overall performance, something I find in Kubrick's remaining films from herein.

Barry Lyndon is maybe Kubrick's ultimate satire of class structures in their many forms, the desire of (and futility of desiring for) elite status.  The ultra rich are shown as silly fools yet untouchable and impenetrable (something Kubrick returns to with Eyes Wide Shut).  The point is that their circles operate in a bubble out of step with the rest of the world, and if they're out of touch and elitist, it's utterly intentional.  Of course there's curiosity, a desire to experience that detachment (as well as all the benefits that come with it) but it's also a tenuous life in that bubble and far easier to find yourself outside it than getting into it.  The point here is that desires of Barry's to be part of the bubble, to have money and status led him to utter ruin, losing everything save his life.

The Shining competes with 2001 as Kubrick's standout or most popular film, many considering its his best. In his whole oeuvre, it's a standout work, a horror-suspense-thriller that doesn't play into Kubrick's usual themes of class structures or commentary on war.

Instead it's an intense film about domestic abuse, the story of living with/surviving an alcoholic domestic abuser.  It's taken a few viewings for me to realize that Jack is not the protagonist of the story.  Danny and Wendy are.  Jack is the villain from the beginning, from the moment we hear that story about him dislocating Danny's shoulder.

In telling this story about a violent household tyrant, the Stephen King-isms, the supernatural aspects muddy that story as much as they accentuate it. Is Jack purely a bad guy?  Or did he literally sell his soul for a drink?  Did Jack go mad because he doesn't understand how the shining is influencing him, or was he always just an asshole? 

This is the first time watching it (after many times) where I clued into the fact that Jack also has the shining (as Dick Halloran kind of explains, it's genetic).  But even then, is it the shining that allows Jack to experience the ghosts of the hotel like Danny does (and if it's the shining that does that, how is Wendy able to see the ghosts at the film's end?) or is the hotel haunted and Jack's somehow a gateway to unleashing the spirits (as Dick Halloran has been there as head chef for years with the shining and no ghosts bothering him).

And then the question of what it means that Jack "has always been the caretaker", and there's pictures of him from 1921?  Is this a Bob from the Red Room/Twin Peaks-like situation?  Did Jack escape from somewhere?  

At times I get too fixated on the nuances of any of the individual faces (Jack, Shelly, Danny, Scatman, even most of the bit players) that I lose track of what any specific scene is trying to tell me.  I think Kubrick too gets lost in faces, but then he always has.  What did it mean when Jack had no money in his wallet the first time bellying up to the bar in the gold room, but did have money the second time?  Continuity error or is there meaning to it?

I can just as easily get lost in any shot composition, taking in the specificity of the details, the lines and patterns found everywhere, the fastidious organization of the Overlook.  Kubrick, obviously, also gets wrapped up in these details, and it seems to take everything in him to follow our lead characters through their introduction to the Overlook while it's getting shut down, as he seems to want to just watch men and women mop up, tidy up, pack up, and shut the place down.

Nicholson and Duvall deliver pretty wild performances.  Jack knows how to do unhinged, and it's very preformative, but it's hard to watch Duvall knowing the strain the filming took on her and the real anxiety that's on the surface of her role as Wendy.  It's at times less a performance than a reaction, and it's upsetting.  The more you know about Kubrick's process, the more his films start to exist outside of what just on screen.  Metacontext starts to seep into the viewing experience and it can taint or further tempt.

Full Metal Jacket, outside of any meta context, is unpleasant, unfocussed, unsatisfying (just like war).

I don't like anything going on within the story of this film, but it's probably the point, that I'm not supposed to. And the reality is what's presented here is probably not even close to being as violent, ugly, racist, vile, bloody, homophobic, or misogynistic as it actually was.

Here's an embarrassing truth: up until yesterday (as of this writing) I didn't really know what, exactly, the Vietnam War was about. It's not that Full Metal Jacket explained it to me, because it certainly didn't do that, nor has any other Vietnam War film.  My wife clued me into it being, once more, political posturing in the American's war on the spread of Communism (as was the Korean war, where one was basically treated as a victory, and the other an embarrassing quagmire).

Part of what doesn't work for me with Full Metal Jacket is that there's no exterior life, and no sense of exterior life.  It's a rather cold and myopic film without much sense of warm or direct compassion.  Instead there's an empathetic response to what's presented but not necessarily focussed around character or characters. There's no true protagonist here, Mathew Modine's Joker is a bit of a void, barely present with such random narration...he is not really our guide through all this (and Kubrick seemed to take pains to not make him funny, charismatic, sympathetic or even relatable...but if you weren't there, can you ever relate?). If the point was to dehumanize all these characters into basically blank nothings, basically mission accomplished.

The film is structured in two parts: basic training and the war.  The training sequence, with R. Lee Ermey's iconic drill sergeant to top all drill sergeants commanding the screen with his name calling, slurs, epithets, disparagement, denigration.  He's a direly unpleasant character with the sole purpose of breaking the new recruits of their individuality and turning them into killing machines, to be turned on and pointed at whomever Uncle Sam points them at.  But more specifically, they're bodies to absorb bullets, and if they happen to send some the other way, the more the better.  There's not a single sense of building boys into men or that there's any plan for what's to become of them when they return home.  The reality is they're not supposed to return home.  That Joker experiences his first death within the barracks creates a detachment for him from the horrors of war.  He knows the deal before he even gets overseas.

The second part presents the war in its many ugly details.  It was a shit war largely bankrolled by a terrifying military industrial complex, sacrificing bodies and destroying souls for ill-advised political posturing. In general I find any document of this war from the American POV to be genuinely discomforting. It took men, turned them into monsters (or tried to), completely breaking them with no intention of building them back up, and set them loose with heavy weaponry on a country, and sent what's left back home without any plans for deprogramming them..

I should really explore this war from the other side...in this film soldiers keep asking why the people hate them so much...but they don't really want the answer.

My immediate reaction to Full Metal Jacket was pretty thorough repulsion, but listening to commentary, reading critiques and analyses, and just sitting with it (as well as watching Paths of Glory) I see more of the intent behind the film.  There's power in dispassionate look at the war, but that lack of direct commentary that Paths of Glory had seems to be a critical absence for me.

And finally we have Kubrick's final film, released shortly after he passed away.  The comment is did Eyes Wide Shut kill Kubrick, or did it keep him alive?

Though clearly not intended as his final statement to the world, it is what it is, and it's a curious final statement indeed.

Eyes Wide Shut was not well-received upon its release and it's nearly 2-year production cycle, eating up precious time in both Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's peak stardom years, plus all the hype about its supposedly scandalous sexuality, was a bit of a head scratcher.  

It certainly didn't sink anyone's carreer, and in recent years, it's even been reassessed as something of a masterpiece, but I'm still leaning towards that original critical befuddlement.

For 25 years I thought Eyes Wide Shut was an even two-hander of Tom and Nicole exploring the twisted world of secret sex societies.  The opening 40 minutes -- which find Nicole playing drunk, stoned or naked -- seem to lead to the idea that their characters of Dr. Bill and Alice are a swinging couple, into polyamory and kind of get off on the idea of the other having sex with other people...only for the other shoe to drop and instead be about Dr. Bill obsessing (in a pathetic, negative way) over the fact that his wife has vivid fantasies about other people.

This leads to Dr. Bill roaming a very claustrophobic New York (London subbing in with a few false storefronts) at night looking for sex ...but why? Because he's jealous? The pathos of his insecurity is eye rollingly tiresome.  I was really hoping Kubrick would have something truly exciting to say about sex and sexuality. Instead Dr. Bill has a series of unconsummated encounters with a patient's daughter, a sex worker, an underage teen, and eventually finds his way into a secret sex society that spins the film on its head from a relationship drama into a merely decent thriller.

Meanwhile, Alice is at home taking care of their kid, watching TV, going to sleep, primarily existing in this film as catalyst for Dr. Bill's dumb adventures by fuelling his insecurities.

It turns out the super secret sex society takes its sexy secret seriously, as it finds Dr. Bill an infiltrator in its midst.  It threatens him and his family, and some connections he has within have unfortunate things happen to them, which Dr. Bill finds out about, and starts getting more and more paranoid, as much as he is intrigued.

Scenes with Tom and Nicole in this film feel wildly unnatural, and they somehow don't seem to know how to act together. Their performances with other actors are much less...hammy than they are with each other.  At one point a stoned Alice starts to laugh at the idea that Dr. Bill thinks she (and women in general) have no inner sexual desire...she keels over laughing in one of the worst fake laughs I've seen put to screen.

Throughout the film, there's small segments that seems to be making a point about female sexuality, and yet we spend most of the second hour following Cruise's doctor as he obsesses about his wife's sexual fantasy and seeks out his own as.  Are men so comically petty? Rather than exploring these wild misconceptions about women and sex, it becomes a mystery thriller, chock full of tits.. It could have been a potent polemic on monogamy (it seemed sold on that fact) . Instead it's pretty disappointingly narrowminded.

It touches upon sexual repression, and sexual exploitation... but takes no time to explore it.  It instead wallows in its gentle misogyny, something that could have been easily countered with a beefier role for Nicole, who was sold as an even partner in this venture.  

Many actresses (and Alan Cumming) really sell wanting to fuck Tom Cruise, and Cruise is often typically his effortful charming self.  But Nicole...she never seems into it, the idea of fucking Tom Cruise.  I can't tell if that's just Nicole (hey, been there, done that, it's not so great), or if it's her/Kubrick's perspective of Alice.  Maybe leading back to that early line the Hungarian gives her about marriage being the only vehicle for women to lose their virginity, and then they can go off and have relations that are more fulfilling.  But the film seems to hang off the last line of dialogue, of Alice saying to Dr. Bill it a toy store that there's only one thing left for them to do...fuck.  But that that last word of dialogue seems perfunctory. It's like when she says "Fuck" she really means "not each other".

In the end Eyes Wide Shut still leaves you thinking.  Spending the years that Kubrick does on constructing the films he does, it leaves a lot to think about, both in the context of the film, and in the meta context of filmmaking.  How much of what is being said intentional, how much is accidental.  When you shoot a scene 80 times, it's such a marriage of intent and accident, but all that overworking, to me, isn't always a positive.  It affects performances, it affects storytelling, it affects messaging. 

Kubrick clearly is a craftsman, and with every film, even the early ones, there was something he was looking for in every scene, and sometimes he just had to take the closest he could get.  It's sad that his obsessive nature meant his output became such a trickle over the final two decades of his life.  Regardless of how I react to some of them, almost all of his films are memorable, and that's impossible to dismiss.

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Ranking Kubrick:

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. The Shining
3. Dr. Strangelove
4. Paths of Glory
5. Killer's Kiss
6. Spartacus
7. Barry Lyndon
8. Eyes Wide Shut
9. Full Metal Jacket
10. The Killing
11. A Clockwork Orange
12. Lolita
    (abstain - Fear and Desire)