Tom Cruise is perfect in 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Tom Cruise is perfect

(WARNING: details of the film explicitly discussed!) 

I remember hearing that for the role of main protagonist (eventually named Dr. William Harford) in Stanley Kubrick's last project (eventually named Eyes Wide Shut) the director considered Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Bill Murray, Albert Brooks. 

I shook my head. "No. They aren't right."

"Why not? It's a comedy, well an erotic comedy, and they're comic actors." 

I shook my head. "No."

Kubrick also considered Alan Alda, Tom Hanks, Warren Beatty.

"No."

"But they're not bad looking."

I shook my head. "They're wrong for the part. Cruise brings something to the role that none of the other actors can."

Kubrick also looked at married couples-- Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, or Bruce Willis and Demi Moore."

I thought about that harder. "Baldwin comes closest, but Cruise is perfect."

"What are you talking about? Why is he perfect? What quality makes him perfect for the role?"

"His enormous sense of entitlement."

Eyes Wide Shut in my book is a comedy, on the surface an erotic comedy but just barely-- the sex scenes lack any real heat or sensuality; the action looks performative if not downright acrobatic. There's nothing relaxed or spontaneous about them, just as (I submit) there's nothing relaxed or spontaneous in any Kubrick film since, O I don't know, Barry Lyndon. To be fair I think this is a deliberate choice on the part of the director, and actually not a bad thing (but that's possibly the subject of a whole other essay). 

If you recall the story, Bill Harford (Cruise) is talking to his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman, at the time Cruise's real-life wife) while smoking weed and smugly declaring she can never be unfaithful, because women are just naturally loyal. Alice laughs and tells the story of how she fantasized about a naval officer she saw while they were on vacation, even considering leaving her husband and daughter for the man. 

The rest of the picture (and the novella the film is based on, Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle) has Bill crisscrossing New York City (Vienna in the novella) trying to take revenge on Alice, to have an adulterously erotic adventure and failing every time; the failure becomes a running gag, to the point where one can suffer a serious case of blue balls trying to watch the poor man score.

Which also I submit explains the nonerotic quality of the orgy-- all that copulation is seen through Bill's eyes, and the fact that it all looks both exotic yet unenticing says something about Bill: that he wants to and doesn't want to; that he knows what he's supposed to do, that this is his own uninformed ideal of what he's supposed to do, yet he feels puritanical panic at the prospect of actually wading in and doing it. Here it all is,  willing flesh in all its variety and as much as he could possibly want several times over, and poor Bill is practically wilting in embarrassment.

And this is where Cruise comes in. If this were Woody Allen or Dustin Hoffman, you'd expect something like that; you'd expect them to pratfall and you'd feel sorry for their misfortune, and all would be that much right in the world. If on the other hand it were Tom Hanks or Warren Beatty you'd feel even sorrier because the latter two are actually decent-looking if not attractive (depending on your aesthetics), and you'd feel some measure of sympathy at their failure to perform. 

But with Cruise you're laughing your head off. 

Because Cruise has an eminently punchable face. From Top Gun to the Mission Impossible movies the man has this ineradicable smirk you dearly want to smear off with a well-swung elbow. His persona, pretty-boy-turned-Hollywood-star, hasn't aged much over the years but especially in 1999, in this perfectly photographed Kubrick production, he comes off as especially arrogant, the kind of upper-class white privilege that badly needs its comeuppance.

And Kubrick gives it to him over and over and over again, like a baseball bat between the legs, for something like two hours. 

I further submit that that ending is actually not a happy ending but Bill Harford running home with that poor excuse of a tail tucked between his legs, and that the film's final word-- Nicole Kidman's Alice looking Tom Cruise's Bill in the eye and suggesting they should 'fuck'-- isn't a promise of pleasures to come but the clanging permanently shut of Bill's cell cage door, possibly loading him down with a second child and barring him from even the possibility of a naughty escapade any time in the future. 

Forever. And ever. And ever. 

If you'd like to turn this traditional Christmas viewing ('traditional,' at least, in my household) into a double feature, may I suggest It's a Wonderful Life, where Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey spends the majority of his adult life trying to escape the little town of Bedford Falls and constantly failing. When he finally cracks and has a meltdown, angels are called in to subject him to a session of hypnotic conditioning a la The Manchurian Candidate. He comes out of the ordeal with eyes bright and glitteringly shiny, suggestive of mirrored balls that hold nothing inside, his mind laundered completely clean of soul. As Tiny Tim might say at the dinner table to newly reformed Scrooge and Tim's own pinkly glowing family-- prior to casting aside both crutches and launching into a spectacular backflip for the television cameras-- "God bless us, every one!"

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