Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Just before remaking Open Your Eyes, Tom Cruise collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on this, his other strangest movie — and one that also prominently features masks. No one who has seen Eyes Wide Shut can say exactly what happens, or who is who.
The rhythm is somnambulant, befitting of a movie based on a novella called Dream Story. Kubrick initially envisioned Steve Martin or Woody Allen starring in his adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 story, and the casting ideas hint at the film’s comic roots — though everyone plays everything very seriously, or perhaps melodramatically.
The film’s strangeness is compounded by the meta drama of the relationship between Cruise and Nicole Kidman, his real-life wife at the time, during an unexpectedly long and complicated shoot. Kubrick died just before the film was released, leaving no one to explain what Eyes Wide Shut means — not that Kubrick ever would have. We think about this film all the time, trying to sort out the precise qualities that make it one of the strangest movies, and most impressive.
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