Entertainment For Lively Minds
My 75 minute Audience Edit of Eyes Wide Shut
How can I see your 75 minute Audience Edit of Eyes Wide Shut? Simple. Stick the usual DVD copy in your player and hit the x2 fast forward button. A much improved version if you ask me.
On release I sat through the film on DVD. It was so slow and boring that I wasn't on my knees praying for the film to end, but for each and every overlong scene in turn to finish. As it was Kubrick’s first film in 12 years I sat through it all. I loathed it. A tiny 40 minute non-story bloated out by the slowest pacing ever to create a two and a half hour monster. The uneventful story itself is also revealed to be tiny with very low dramatic stakes. What is the point of this film?
Some critics have the audacity to call it a flawed masterpiece. Flawed piece of shit is too kind.
The best thing I can say about it is that some of the lights have a nice burned into the film-stock look to them. Yes, that is literally the best thing about the film. Curiously the exact same complaints and minor praise can be applied to his 1975 historical dud Barry Lyndon. Another incredibly slow, overlong, dramatically inert monster with really pretty looking lighting created by real candles (a technical marvel at the time).
It’s astonishing to think that it took about twenty years to adapt from a novella, a year and a half to film and a year to edit (my numbers might not be super accurate). The film could easily have been filmed within a month like a normal film. When I saw the extended argument in the apartment in the film Le Mépris (AKA Contempt) by Godard, I thought, that’s it. That is how they should have shot Eyes Wide Shut. They should have just quickly and messily shot a semi-improvised deliberately pretentious film over a few weeks for less than a million dollars. As it’s so cheap who cares if no one beyond a few film critics see it and roast it? Instead they had to make a big budget production out of such slight material.
For reasons of masochism I have returned to the movie two more times over the last nine years. And it remains a colossal dud. If you accept the painful inert pacing and the tiny storyline then it’s not too painful, but it’s still far from being even borderline okay.
I decided to try something a little bit out of the box in an attempt to make it watchable for my fourth viewing today. I decided to watch the whole thing at x2 fast forward. 95% of the dialogue remained intelligible, and the 5% I didn’t pick up I either didn’t care about or I could work out the gist from the dialogue surrounding it. This way the awful draggy pace will be picked up and the running time halved to a more realistic 75 minutes.
And the film was bearable. The crap story and banal dialogue etc didn’t suddenly burst into life, but at least things moved at a reasonable non-patience trying speed.
And then the last post-orgy stretch turned up. If anything, the film SLOWED DOWN even further as Tom Cruise revisited the previous scenes. Seriously, what film slows down as it reaches its climax? A normal film is always gathering speed so that by the end it’s racing towards the end. Kubrick and the Coen Brothers are about the only filmmakers I can think of who start slow and stay at that exact same pace from start to finish. It’s just wrong.
The Coen Brothers movies used to drive me up the wall with the slow pace of all of their films until I learned to expect, and accept it. Fargo for example was such a horrible viewing experience first time I saw it as it took forever to get anywhere. Now whenever I put one of their films on I say to myself to expect that it will be slow from start to finish. If you expect it to take forever to get anywhere then it can’t frustrate you as it’s exactly what you expected (it’s not the traffic jam that’s making you angry, it’s your expectations of getting to your destination quickly that is causing you to lose your temper).
I can sit happily through almost any Coen Brothers film now, as long as it’s actually a good film, but Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is way beyond the pale. Even at x2 speed the film drags at its climax. The story really is so small and insignificant and the pace is too patience trying. As entertainment it really, really fails. As “art” it fails because it’s rubbish with nothing to say that can be mistaken as profound, unlike 2001, which at least suggests or hints at something being said.
Some arthouse film snobs say that some films are not meant to be entertaining, and work on a different level. I don’t buy it. A film is meant as entertainment. If it doesn’t engage on some sort of entertainment level then it’s not very good. Well I’ll happily be the philistine who stands up says that Kubrick is a so-so director with a knack for finding interesting novels to adapt and then stepping back into the limelight and allowing others to big him up in order to create a legendary reputation.
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You were lucky..
I went to the cinema to see it, lured in by the less-than-subtle charms of the trailer and a certain respect for Mr Kubrick. I left, at the end, having endured the entire experience with the GLW. I can normally "talk up" any rubbish, but that one eluded me.
Aside from 2001, most of Kubrick's work I find hard going, and I agree with your summary of his career. I think he stopped making "interesting" films after 2001. I mean, who watches Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon or Full Metal Jacket these days?
It's a fizzer
If a film is not "entertaining" it's fallen at the very first hurdle, anyone who suggests otherwise has very little understanding of the artform. The cinema is at heart storytelling and is the direct descendant of cavemen talking around the campfire about how Gronk once slew a woolly mammoth. "The odds were against him..."
Eyes Wide Shut is a failure because basically nothing happens. Tom wanders around, nothing happens, he wanders around some more, nothing happens, he goes to an ORGY and nothing happens! Only Kubrick could make an orgy seem boring.
It is well-made but I don't care how well made a film is. A film-makers technique is merely a means to an ends, not an end unto itself. If I'm giving you over two hours of my time you'd better tell me a story worth hearing and Eyes Wide Shut ain't one.
It always reminded me of a Hammer horror film.
And I agree, it's terrible.
As is Full Metal Jacket. Could London Docklands double for Vietnam? Nope!
I like it
Always did. I think its climate of sexual jealousy is disturbingly accurate. It's not perfect, no; but I think it's a great deal better than its virtually unanimous perception of the last decade would have us believe. I have, to this day, only met one other person who likes it.
I don't quite get it. Are
I don't quite get it. Are you seriously saying you watch Eyes Wide Shut at twice the normal speed? As in sped up with all the voices high? Whats the point?
Anyway this isn'y going to be intelligent counter argument but EWS is fine, and Fargo is easily one of the best films of the 90's its excellent. I've seen it twice in the last six months and each time its brilliant.
So there.
On the PS3, you can play
On the PS3, you can play movies at various speed without changing the pitch - it just cuts out bits, so speeding it up a little would still be pretty clear. It made a couple of the more *glacial* episodes of Mad Men that bit more bearable!
My father in law
is the producer of Barry Lyndon, and he is immensely proud of the film.
.
A slight defence
Yeah, a bit of a celluloid bloater, but I've always thought there's something genuinely powerful about the scene in which Cruise infiltrates the orgy. It's here that Kubrick conjures a kind of demonically dreamy fugue state, and for me it captures the sense of a child glimpsing the world of adult sexuality - a world that fascinates, repels and unnerves in equal measure. Mesmeric, dangerous. I've never seen anyone quite nail that feeling on screen before or since, so kudos to Kubrick for that, at least.
Barry Lyndon is brilliant,
Barry Lyndon is brilliant, your father in law should be proud.
I have to defend this film
I genuinely love Eyes Wide Shut. Probably one of my favourite Kubrick films. Nick (above) describes the orgy scene well, but I also think his description applies to the whole film. The whole thing is a "demonically dreamy fugue state", it really captures that 4am feeling where the world is sleeping and your paranoid anxiety dreams start infiltrating your waking thoughts.
In fact it's hard to talk about the film without using the word "dream", but I think that's the state of mind the film has captured. And no, it's not actually an "enjoyable" film in the superficial sense: but then I "enjoy" getting made to feel uncomfortable from time to time. It's an uncomfortable watch, but the lack of comfort is compelling.
(I think I might have failed the test of trying not to sound like a film snob)
Yesterday I re-read
a substantial chunk of Frederick Rafael's memoir of writing Eyes Wide Shut, titled Eyes Wide Open. He indicates that he tried to write a denser, funnier, more detailed film with semi-interesting characters. And he would hand his drafts in and have Kubrick ask him to remove any new details not in the novella*, junk anything resembling humour and flat line the characters to make them as nondescript and empty as possible. Kubrick was also not keen for a long time in having the events at the start connecting with the ending in order to create another shapeless random film like Full Metal Jacket. He took a lot of convincing to bring Sydney Pollack's character back for the climax. And the "reveal" billiard-room scene that Rafael wrote was dismissed as too Bogart-Greenstreet, so it was blanded down with each new draft until it was just more banal nuts and bolts dialogue.
I get the impression that if the film had been made from Rafael's earlier draft then a much more fuller, more entertaining and substantial film would have been made. He tried to bring life to it and Kubrick sucked it all out.
Rafael seems to think Kubrick deliberately removed anything interesting and quirky in order to create as blank a script as possible so he could then later apply his directorial imagination to it. Unfortunately he had no imagination beyond how to light it. The problem with a good script, according t o Rafael, is that it usually directs itself. There's an obvious way to shoot it and so the director ends up being told what to do by default. Kubrick preferred to have no obligations such as these.
So I think it's fair to say that Kubrick sucked more life out of the film than any other director would have.
A shame the book ends before the film was released so I don't know what the screenwriter thinks of the finished film.
* For example there was a fascinating idea for a line of dialogue. Kidman asks Cruise if he has ever fantasied that she was a boy. A show stopping line but Kubrick dismissed straight away.
That's really interesting
I might look up that book you mention.
I think you could probably tell a similar tale with a lot of Stanley's films: certainly The Shining and 2001 are both films where a great deal of narrative sense has been sucked out, leaving a kind of blankness.
The trouble is, I LIKE the blankness. David Lynch is similar as well.
It would be interesting for someone to film Eyes Wide Shut as a straight erotic thriller with a proper dramatic resolution. I suspect it would come out like Basic Instinct and I would still prefer Stanley Kubrick and his beautiful lighting.
I think Stanley Kubrick is what he is. If you want the existential dreaminess and beautiful lighting then you have to forego neat resolutions and fast pacing. I can take this in Eyes Wide Shut: but he lost me in Barry Lyndon and Clockwork Orange.
You like
existential emptiness? You MUST see The Pornographer. The blankest, emptiest movie I've ever seen. I loath it as it could be so much more, and yet it sits there, blank, empty, refusing to dramatise and pay-off anything. You'll love it.
The French do existential emptiness so well that I'm not sure I've ever seen a dramatic French film that doesn't hum with the blank empty spaces between the people.
There's also an interesting Sean Connery movie called Cuba. It's completely devoid of any substance. Instead it's all dramatic surfaces and set design, exotic location filming and a corrupt, dirty ambient feel. It's fascinatingly blank. It's like an existential action film.
I like it like cheesecake
Too much would make me ill.
But I'm always looking for films to fill up my Lovefilm list, so I'll give those two a look. (Assuming you're not pulling my leg? My irony detector has a bit of a low battery today...)