The previous installment of the Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) retrospective discusses “Lolita.”
After “Eyes Wide Shut” there would never be another Stanley Kubrick film. There would be no more controversy, no more staring madmen, and no more elegant long takes. The man who made “Dr Strangelove”, “2001”, and “Barry Lyndon” died just after the completion of his 13th feature film and his first since 1987’s “Full Metal Jacket.”
“The heir to no one and, unlike his contemporaries Bergman, Antonioni, or Godard, has no direct inheritor” was how Michel Ciment described Kubrick. The director’s reputation had grown to mythic proportions during his 12-year absence from our cinema screens. Countless stories, rumours and intrigues about Kubrick and his next project surfaced during this period. Even a conman, Alan Conway, could pose as the director without remotely looking like him because of Kubrick’s long hiatus from the media glare.
Toss in the A-List hand grenade of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, then Hollywood’s golden couple, a three-year shoot, and the promise of erotic subject matter – “Eyes Wide Shut” was never going to survive such intense critical scrutiny and come out of it completely intact. But we quickly forget how Kubrick always divided both audiences and critics alike. Ciment and Alexander Walker were largely biased in his favour but David Thomson called the film, “A travesty” and Kubrick a “ ’Master’ who always knew too much about film and too little about life.”