Eyes Wide Shut: Special Edition (BD) [Blu-ray]

Many reviewers have made comments on the script, soundtrack, artistic direction, and acting in Eyes Wide Shut. All are superb, especially the interior photography, but I would rather focus on the profound story-telling in this exceptional film. The plot of Eyes Wide Shut weaves together the path of man's fall from Grace, his struggle and journey to regain that state, and the amazing almost accidental way that Grace is restored to the human spirit. Tom Cruise plays Dr. Tom, the Everyman. Nicole Kidman plays Allison, his wife. In the beginning of the film she plays the Eve archtype, who stimulates the fall from Grace with a curious note of discord and jealousy. Tom, the Adam/Everyman character, has it all in his Garden of Eden. He has a wonderful medical practice near Central Park. His beautiful wife, who is shown in total naked innocense in the first scene of the film, manages an art gallery in SoHo. They have a multimillion dollar apartment overlooking the Park. They have a bright and lovely young daughter that loves them. They have a beautiful and to all appearances perfect life. They attend a Holiday Party at the home of an ultra-rich, ultra-powerful patient of Dr. Tom. While separated, the Devil (disquised as a suave sophisticated older man) asks Nicole to dance and within minutes begins to seduce her and try to get her to go upstairs and have sex with him. The actor who plays this Devil character was perfect. He was slim with a big head full of white hair. He wraps himself around Nicole Kidman like a slinky boa constrictor. She avoids the seduction despite being slightly intoxicated. Yet she does not escape unharmed for he has planted the seed of discord in her mind. She performed well and she would like to be praised for resisting this seduction, but she realizes her husband will never know. Dr. Tom in the meanwhile is tending to the herion overdose of a very high priced prostitute. Laying nude and unconscious, this woman appears to be the apex of earthly beauty. Dr. Tom revives her and treats her with extreme kindness and dignity and handles the entire situation very diplomatically. Again, in mirror image to his wife, he has performed beautifully yet he can't really tell his wife what he has experienced. They both leave the party with secrets they can not share. After smoking a join at home, Allison challenges her husband that he really does not understand the sexual desires of women and he really doesn't know her thoughts and secrets. The Devil has done his work! Adam is about to be handed the apple! Allison admits that she had a consuming overwhelming sexual fantasy while the family was on Cape Cod based on a military officer she saw eating dinner in a restaurant. Dr. Tom's fall begins here and boy does he fall! He journeys through the night-life of Manhattan but eventually gets caught up in the nest of Devils in their sexual orgy hideaway. His life is in danger and yet a beautiful prostitute saves him and he is allowed to leave. Later he finds that she has died of an overdose. Remember that a sacrifice is required when one falls from Grace, a maxim of every religion. In some ways his journey is like Ullyses trying to make his way home to the waiting Penelope. This is especailly true with the wild encounters he has with Manhattan low-life on his night's journey. He is almost seduced by a street walker who he finds out later has AIDS. He makes his way back to his wife, full of contradictions and uncertainties, but resolved to rejoin with her - to renew the emotional bonds that he lost during his night of journey into dark places. The film ends in a gigantic toy store, a place of renewed innocence, and when Dr. Tom asks Allison where to they go from here, she acknowledges that they move forward together for they were "lucky". It is this word "lucky" that resolves the story from a theological point of view, for they have been saved by the Grace of God. They don't deserve this gift,they really didn't ask for it, they just struggled in the dark like all human beings. Yet, in the end they are the recipients of this Grace. Stanley Kubrick based this film on Arthur Schnitzler's short novel "Traumnovelle", but surely Schnitzler based his novel on the eternal story of Adam and Eve, the fall and the redemption. This film that was judged obscene turns out to be sacred.

Whether or not you like Tom Cruise probably won't matter 'as much' in a movie like Eyes Wide Shut. The basic premise is about a very wealthy doctor and family man (Tom Cruise), opening his eyes to the world around him while living in New York City with his wife (Nicole Kidman), and daughter. This movie is more on par with a psychological thriller. Basically Tom is one curious cat, and is out to live life a little bit on the wild side. Along the way he finds himself at a very private party in a huge mansion out in (I'm guessing), West Chester County, New York. Actually that part of the movie might be the most action-packed part. I'm going to talk about this party scene for a little bit not only because it was probably one of the more remembered scenes in the movie, but also because I think the late director, the great Stanley Kubrick, was trying to tell us simple folks a few things. This party that Tom Cruises manages to sneak in uninvited is as I said a very upscale and private party. Everyone at this party wears masks. The only way people can get in is if they know the password. Tom's friend (a piano player who can play blindfolded), was invited to this party to play the piano or some other instrument. He somewhat braggingly gave Tom the password to get in. When Tom Cruise's character makes his way into this party he comes across a huge room where there seems to be some type of quasi-religious ritual going on. This ritual involves barely clothed beautiful women. Then the women each go and join with a few of the men surrounding them, (Everyone wearing a mask and cloak is basically a male). Anyway, Tom gets discovered and is told to remove his clothes when one of the women shouts "I redeem him!". Basically she is sort of "sacrificing" herself for Tom. Tom is then given a very threatening and stern warning to never speak of what he witnessed at this party. My take on this scene goes back to what Stanley Kubrick himself once said about the lost art of observation. These masked men at this party were most likely not just American politicians but politicians from all over the world. The sexual ritual was some type of Satanist-pagan ritual. My own opinion (and I know not everyone believes in this), is that Stanley Kubrick was trying to subtly convey the message that the Illuminati are real, and that this type of depraved ritualistic sex parties are the types of things that the most powerful and elite people in this world engage in. And that perhaps they are all devil worshippers. As someone who has done a lot of research on the Order of the Perfectibilists, I can say this movie seems to almost directly call out what most "conspiracy theorists" believe are the "Illuminati". Anyway, this is a very chilling and psychologically thrilling movie and I highly recommend it to anyone.

Stanley Kubrick spent the last years of his life working on this film. And by the time Eyes Wide Shut went into general release in the United States, the director was already deceased, giving his final project the cachet of a farewell gesture-or perhaps a Last Judgment, since the Dies Irae from the Mozart Requiem can be heard at one point on the soundtrack. Yet its long awaited appearance turned out to be something of an anticlimax when most of the pre-release gossip turned out to be unjustified. No dazzling spectacle in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey nor even A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut (made available here as part of Warner Home Video's excellent set of Kubrick's films) was first of all a fable for the approaching millennium, directed with a breathtaking désinvolture that still seems astonishing several years later. One day, I hope, Eyes Wide Shut will be recognized as one of the most beautiful works in the history of the cinema. Only in bad works of art or the artifacts of pop culture is it possible to make a facile distinction between the periphery of a work and its core. In an imaginative creation like Kubrick's last film, the limits of the core extend to its furthermost boundaries just as what could at first glance seem peripheral penetrates to its innermost recesses. Already, the opening shots of the Harfords in their stylish apartment getting ready to go out for a soiree go far beyond simply establishing a setting. The least that could be said about these powerfully iridescent, Ophulsian compositions set to music by Shostakovitch is how much more than functional they are: rather than simply establishing a particular locale, they serve to introduce us to a perversely enchanted world. The mise en scène is incantatory, but the spirits it is calling up are those of high-tech consumerism. In these images, the décor glows with a maleficent radiance, making of the Harfords themselves little more than the props of their own property. Small wonder that such a culture finds the culmination of its most refined pleasures in the celebration of a Black Mass at a mansion on Long Island--movie trivia buffs will not fail to notice a visual allusion to Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest--attended by the crème de la crème of the rich, famous, and powerful, a ritual which blasphemously travesties the Christmas festivities taking place at the same moment and which has striking parallels to the events of de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom in both its literary version and its much later screen adaptation by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò o le 120 giornati di Sodoma (1975). In the milieu in which the Harfords move, reified to the last degree, success is all a matter of remaining on the surface of things, and Bill Harford has thoroughly mastered that skill. But the surface begins to crack open one evening when his wife relates a fantasy about sleeping with a Naval officer they had briefly glimpsed at a resort. Bill reacts violently to this confession, insisting that he has never had similar fantasies of his own. But he cannot exorcise the images she has planted in his mind and they soon begin to take shape on the screen. Moreover, this fantasy which increasingly obsesses Harford opens up to a larger world of collective desires underlying the beautiful realm of surfaces in which Bill wishes to remain happily imprisoned. Forced to confront that underworld by series of encounters involving the daughter of a patient, a prostitute, and ultimately a Satanist coven, he can only reject it as a mystery. The phrase "eyes wide shut" is virtually an etymological gloss on the word "mystery." In the words of Carl Kerényi (in his essay "The Mysteries of the Kabeiroi"), "The source of the term 'Mysteria'--as also of 'mystes' and 'mystikos'--consists in a verb whose ritual significance is 'to initiate' (µυeΐν), developed from the verb µύeιν, 'to close the eyes or mouth.'" He goes on to add, "the Mysteria begin for the mystes when, as sufferer of the event (µυούµeνος), he closes his eyes, falls back as it were into his own darkness, enters into the darkness." And is there anything less enigmatic about an audience sitting in a darkened theater, an audience which also could be said to fall back as it were into its own darkness, to enter its darkness--to borrow Kerenyi's formulation--watching this spectacle being enacted on screen? It is Bill's friend, the musician Nick Nightingale who tells him of playing at an event whose specifics are unclear to him, since he has to play blindfolded. Nevertheless, the few details he has been able to spy upon after the blindfold slightly fell from his eyes the last time he performed rouse Bill's interest, and he demands to go along to the event. When Harford, the non-initiate, violates this mystery, he not only disrupts its performance, but commits a crime which can only be atoned for by a human sacrifice--that of the young woman whom Harford has previously rescued from a drug overdose at the fancy party the evening before. Yet there is little mystery about this mystery, which continues in a perhaps more explicit vein the theme of archaic regression that recurs throughout Kubrick's work--perhaps most arrestingly in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which modern technology is presented as an outgrowth of the anthropoids' fetishization of the black obelisk which has descended to them from the heavens like the stone given by Gabriel to Abraham enshrined in the Kaaba. Civilization is constantly haunted by the specter of the barbaric past it has never been able to overcome, and the cult in Eyes Wide Shut is only a final incarnation of this key motif which Kubrick employed here for last time. After that death had the final word: Acta est fabula!

If Stanley Kubrick took a break from death to read some of the reviews here, I can only hope he'd slip into uncontrollable laughter. But then he'd have to pause. "Why," I suspect he'd ask, "do my films attract such empty barrels?" Anyway, I hope I'm not one of them. Eyes Wide Shut, I think, is a deceptively simple meditation on human honesty in the context of our dearest human institution ... marriage. Of course, much of the dishonesty in relationships centers around sexuality, and the conflict between the sexual roles imposed by the institution itself, and the far less clear lines that exists within each of us. And so, we round pegs shoved in the square holes of an artificial and ancient institution struggle to be both open and closed to each other. In the marriage at the heart of this film, both husband and wife have their own, hidden fantasies, longings, disappointments, and wishes that don't fit neatly into what is expected of them. Nicole Kidman's character, in a moment of marijuana induced honesty, admits to having something less than an idealized fidelity to her husband ... that the mere glance of a stranger could destroy it all (and nearly did once). Of course, Cruise's character has secrets of his own, and Kidman's brutal and devastating disclosure plunges him into fugue state where his own conflicts of role and sexuality surface. Cruise's journey touches on many areas of the "forbidden" ... from homosexuality (the taunting of "roughs" leads him into the hands of a prostitute uncertain whether he belongs there) to a possible dalliance with a patient to a ritualistic orgy. Of course, much like his wife has owned her hidden side, he must, eventually, own his ... and he does. A central metaphor here is the mask. And with his mask finally stripped free and sitting on his pillow, Cruise (never before wanting to remove his mask or costume) relents and tells all ... and we can only hope, by that point, that his relationship can survive transformed ... or not. It depends on who or what you are rooting for, as with any great film. Their is fodder for both points of view. Eyes Wide Shut is a powerful searchlight into the psychology of sexuality and marriage, into truth and honesty, and into the question of who (and what) we really are. Don't be put off by the pedantic and lunatic silliness of many of the reviews you'll read. They're mainly by folks desperate to sound smart, to read more (and sometimes less) into the film than is really there. Eyes Wide Shut, thankfully, doesn't need their help.

good movie

Arrived on time, item as described

This movie is a lesson for all couples.

Disgusting, boring movie with a terrible script and storyline.