Stanley Kubrick's long awaited last film "Eyes Wide Shut," has finally arrived but Kubrick is gone . The famous director died barely a week after the film's completion.
More than two years in the making, Kubrick casts Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, who are married in real life, as the happily married and successful New Yorkers, the "beautiful people," who set off on an erotic and surreal journey of the flesh and the mind. This odyssey leaves them less than beautiful, and the audience more than confused.
In the words of David Denby, New Yorker film critic, Kubrick has staged the "most pompous orgy in the history of the movies." Maybe so, but the film is beautifully orchestrated as only Kubrick can do.
The film is taken from an earlier work of Viennese Arthur Schnitzler, "Traumnovelle," which has been translated as "Dream Story"in English editions.
Tom Cruise plays Dr. Bill Harford, a Manhattan doctor, who, after hearing his wife's erotic confessions, takes off on an eroticized dream landscape of his own through the very real streets of New York to a gothic mansion of surreal dimensions where he spends the night. Or does he?
Kubrick's films always generate controversy and this thirteenth and last movie lives up to his reputation for genius as well as controversy.