EYES WIDE SHUT: WHAT THE CRITICS FAILED TO SEE IN KUBRICK’S LAST FILM
by Lee Siegel
[Harper’s Magazine]
Eyes Wide Shut is one of the most moving, playful, and complex movies I have ever seen. I love the way Stanley Kubrick expresses the film’s theme of social and psychological doubleness through a double entendre in the film’s very title—Eyes Wide Shut—and through his choice, for the title song, of a waltz by Dmitry Shostakovich, a guileful composer famous for writing music whose subtle motifs seemed to celebrate Stalin but actually undermined him. I love the film’s spare, almost allegorical portrait of the tension and complexity at the heart of a marriage. So imagine my alarm when, picking up one magazine and newspaper after another, I read reviews calling Kubrick’s film a disaster and a titanic error, trite and self-important, one of the worst movies the critics had ever seen.