by Nick Taylor
Hey, you there! Yeah, you! How well do you think you know your wife? Your partner? The human being you consider your most intimate companion, someone you trust so implicitly that you may in fact take for granted the idea that they have as many mysteries and desires as you yourself do? If you’re laboring under such delusions and need a stark reminder of such realities, then do I have a movie and a performance for you! Our celebration of Nicole Kidman’s ‘90s uprising has reached its conclusion with Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut...
There’s so many directions from which one could approach Eyes Wide Shut - its status as Kubrick’s final film and the attached debate of whether it’s a masterpiece or an utter flop (I say masterpiece, easily), the sexual explicitness and baroque plotting, the metatextual dynamic of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise acting onscreen as husband and wife for the last time and their divorce two years later. I am thinking about these things, holding them in my hands like delicate eggs resting in a bird’s nest. But these dynamics are mere accessories to be deployed on behalf of a specific thesis statement rarely if ever before wielded here at TFE: Nicole Kidman is very, very, very good in this movie.
So we’ll be thinking about those topics, along with how Eyes Wide Shut fits into the continuity of Kidman’s quickly stacked American resume, her proclivity of working with auteurs at different points in their careers, her willingness to play sexuality onscreen. We can even think about this as arguably her last major theatrical release before her breakthrough with the Academy.
We start Eyes Wide Shut where all movies of taste and caliber deserve to start: ogling beautiful people. Mr. and Mrs. Harford are getting gussied up for a Christmas party - the perks of being a doctor with rich clients - and we get to watch the pretty couple assemble themselves for this event. Alice’s body is as much a site of cinematic fascination as Bill’s interiority, and though the opening minutes of the film are about adjusting our eyes and ears to its unusual sensory experiences, it’s just as much about acclimating to Kidman’s sheer beauty. Those glasses? That insolent stare? The sheer lack of self-consciousness around her body, which doesn’t mean she isn’t damn proud of it and excited to rile up her man? She’s the world’s sexiest librarian, as captivating to behold as any freaky mask or diffused, iridescent lighting.
In no time at all the Harfords arrive at the party, and Alice spends the entire time hungrily observing everything around her. Actually, “hungry” is too tame a descriptor. She’s visibly, almost indiscriminately turned on by the whole affair, by the wealth and glamor and all the handsome people who are eyeing her like a prized catch. Kidman barely looks at Cruise during their first dance, soaking it all in and looking for something or someone else to entertain her. Soon she’s “slipping away to the bathroom” to grab some champagne and hunt for a new dance partner. When she sees her husband with two redheads draped on his arms, she mainly looks curious about it. Is she learning something new about her husband’s appetites? Is this just empty peacocking to her? Does Alice think he might actually cheat on her, and is that thought arousing to her?
There’s certainly no double-standard to her gaze, not when she’s dancing in the arms of a Hungarian silver fox named Szandor Szavost (Sky du Mont). Alice is having a lovely time trading praises and innuendos, and she stares into Szandor’s eyes longer and more intensely than she did Bill’s. He knows she’s married, and doesn’t mind a bit. Kidman plays her interactions with this man as though Alice is either growing increasingly intoxicated or wielding some slurry, slow-talking affectations as extra punctuation. Yet Kidman also endows Alice with a real steeliness underneath her indulgences, and she ends the night telling this fox she can’t go home with him because she’s . . . . well, she’s married. It really matters to her. It’s not a hollow excuse to ward off an old man, but something sincere coming deep from her core. She likes the thrill of all that temptation to take home to her marital bed. Maybe the biggest boon to Kidman’s performance is how Alice has a real companionship with her husband, even as it’s clear her thoughts and attentions can drift to other men.
The next night Alice rolls a joint and pokes Bill about whether or not he considered sleeping with those twins. It quickly shifts into an interrogation, once Bill says the thought of being unfaithful never truly crossed his mind, and he retorts that he couldn’t even imagine Alice sleeping with another man. She decides to puncture this idealized version of her living in his head. It’s not because he’s wrong, per say, but because he’s taking her choice to stay loyal to him for granted. The hysterical laughter Kidman unleashes before her famous monologue, so side-splittingly amazed at her husband’s white-bread convictions that she collapses onto the floor of their bedroom, is not my favorite beat of her performance. But the agitation, petulance, and simmering arousal that defines her conversation before this moment, and her reverie for a handsome sailor she never even spoke to, radiate the most concentrated version of baroquely horny danger Eyes Wide Shut has exhibited til this point.
Kidman hurls Alice’s fantasy about the sailor at her husband like it’s a lead pipe, and damn if it doesn’t knock him upside the head so hard he goes wandering into a sex cult. But the crucial part of this monologue, for me, is that I did not believe her claim that she would have abandoned her family for a night in this stranger’s bed for one goddamn second. There’s a lot of conviction to it, sure, but I interpreted this primarily as Alice trying to scare her man, to forcefully remind him that she has desires as paradoxical and as crucial to who she is as he does. This is reinforced later on, when Bill wakes Alice up from a nightmare of being raped by sailors and she pleads for him to forgive her threat that she could everleave him. Kidman plays this fear without the performative edge of her mocking laughter.
Certainly Kubrick deserves to be credited along with Kidman on navigating this characterization of Alice, giving real layers to her gratuitous vices rather than making her a deranged, one-dimensional alibi for Bill’s own tailspin. For all the widely-publicized discord around the film’s production and conflicting reports about whether Kidman and Cruise got along with their director, there’s a real harmony to her performance. We can talk about whether the lack of ambiguity fully serves a film so hellbent on preserving mystery in so many other narrative avenues. Maybe we can talk about if you interpreted Alice the same way I did! What Kidman does do in fucking spades is serve Eyes Wide Shut’s erotic and psychological unpredictability, while offering a treatise on a particular kind of woman’s sense of marital loyalty. Who’s to say if Alice will keep thinking about that sailor man? I think she might, if Bill doesn’t wise up and stop taking her for granted. Hell, maybe he should go back to that creepy costume shop and rent a naval officer’s uniform. Meet her at her level. She said she wants to fuck, buddy. Listen to her.
Previously in the Nicole Kidman TFE Tribute:
- Introduction + Early Australian Films
- Billy Bathgate (1991) – her first Golden Globe nomination!
- Malice (1993) - when Kidman met Sorkin
- To Die For (1995) - her first Golden Globe win!
- Practical Magic (1998) - comfort food cinema
Next, we finally arrive at Nicole Kidman's first Oscar nomination. It's time for the spectacular spectacular delights of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!