Finally watched the movie last night. One of my friends who had seen the movie gave me a very valuable advice. He told me not to watch it with any sort of expectation and to keep in mind that it’s a Stanley Kubrick movie.
If you ever watch the movie on DVD, don’t miss Steven Spielberg’s interview. The movie won’t be complete without his interview. I didn’t care much what Cruise and Kidman had to say.
Kubrick has this strange and vaguely appealing symbolism in his movies which is presented differently each time. I can’t really pinpoint it but it goes to the way he represents a subplot or develops a character over the sequence of ‘scattered’ scenes.
For example, the boot camp sequence in Full Metal Jacket is very isolated from the rest of the movie. Even the transition of the plot does not identify much with first hour of the movie. It is related, yes, but it is not smoothly transitive. He just deliberately left it open and obvious. As a matter of fact, you can simply watch first half of the movie and consider yourself have seen one complete movie. To me it is symbolic because the movie is just so well made and cinematographed that it makes you realized how both parts of the movie portray two different pictures.
In A Clockwork Orange it was the 70’s colors, the way room was decorated, the accent, unusal composition of dialogues, the futuristic touch, a sense of ultra violence with a notion of milk club (I was actually expecting more gory details of violence in that movie though) and finally the immoral irony in the end.
In Eyes Wide Shut he just plays around with the plot. At one time, Cruise’s character is going through a personal and inflictive ideation. It is slow and long and then suddenly the plots develops into a terrifying mystery. But his infliction still does not go away. He is still traumatized by his thoughts while getting close to the mystery.
Any director can make a movie that you can’t expect what is going to happen next but it was only Kubrick who could take the risk of adding symbolism to it and still make a masterpiece.
The only other example I can think of for a different director is Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, when Martin Sheen finally finds Brando and the movie puts on an entirely different mode.