Product Description

A wifes admission of unfulfilled sexual longings plunges her husband into an erotic odyssey that could destroy his marriage and perhaps even ensnare him in a lurid murder mystery. Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 09/27/2005 Starring: Tom Cruise Nicole Kidman Run time: 159 minutes Rating: R Director: Stanley Kubrick

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24762 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2001-06-12
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Full Screen, Original recording remastered, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 159 minutes

Amazon.com
It was inevitable that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut would be the most misunderstood film of 1999. Kubrick died four months prior to its release, and there was no end to speculation how much he would have tinkered with the picture, changed it, "fixed" it. We'll never know. But even without the haunting enigma of the director's death--and its eerie echo/anticipation in the scene when Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) visits the deathbed of one of his patients--Eyes Wide Shut would have perplexed and polarized viewers and reviewers. After all, virtually every movie of Kubrick's post-U.S. career had; only 1964's Dr. Strangelove opened to something approaching consensus. Quite apart from the author's tinkering, Kubrick's movies themselves always seemed to change--partly because they changed us, changed the world and the ways we experienced and understood it. And we may expect Eyes Wide Shut to do the same. Unlike Kubrick himself, it has time.

So consider, as we settle in to live with this long, advisedly slow, mesmerizing film, how challenging and ambiguous its narrative strategy is. The source is an Arthur Schnitzler novella titled Traumnovelle (or "Dream Story"), and it's a moot question how much of Eyes Wide Shut itself is dream, from the blue shadows frosting the Harfords' bedroom to the backstage replica of New York's Greenwich Village that Kubrick built in England. Its major movement is an imaginative night-journey (even the daylight parts of it) taken by a man reeling from his wife's teasing confession of fantasized infidelity, and toward the end there is a token gesture of the couple waking to reality and, perhaps, a new, chastened maturity. Yet on some level--visually, psychologically, logically--every scene shimmers with unreality. Is everything in the movie a dream? And if so, who is dreaming it at any given moment, and why?

Don't settle for easy answers. Kubrick's ultimate odyssey beckons. And now the dream is yours. --Richard T. Jameson

DVD features
EDITOR'S NOTE: The U.S. (Region 1) DVD release of Eyes Wide Shut presents the film in its R-rated U.S. theatrical version--submitted and approved by Stanley Kubrick per contractual obligation--with digitally inserted figures added to obscure explicit sexual activity during the 65-second orgy scene. At present there are no plans to release the "unaltered" version on DVD in Region 1. Regarding the full-screen format of Eyes Wide Shut on DVD, the official wording on the DVD packaging is as follows: "This feature is presented in the full aspect ratio of the original camera negative, as Stanley Kubrick intended." As with the DVD formatting of The Shining and Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut was matted in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio for theatrical presentation, but the director composed his films in camera to accommodate television broadcast and home video viewing. The official aspect ratio of Eyes Wide Shut on DVD is 1.37:1.

From The New Yorker
A stiff, alas. The late Stanley Kubrick's last movie, based on Arthur Schnitzler's novella "Traumnovelle" (1926), is about a New York doctor (Tom Cruise) whose wife (Nicole Kidman) unexpectedly confesses her sexual interest in a young naval officer she spotted during a vacation. This revelation sends the doctor out into the streets of New York at night, where he is approached by a variety of women, undergoes perverse adventures, and finally winds up at an enormous, preposterous orgy, at which men in cloaks and naked masked women disport themselves without apparent pleasure or energy. The doctor's adventures are perhaps meant to be a voyage through the unconscious, but they remain unconnected visually to the early marital scenes. Instead, they float free, and all the details seem wrong. Kubrick's direction-ponderously deliberate and distant, lacking in the intimacy that the movie would seem to be crying out for-never gets a firm grip on either fantasy or reality. The maddening two-note piano composition during the orgy is by György Ligeti. The adaptation is by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

1999's future classic--"It's not about sex"
1999 was one of the greatest years in recent memory for film. Yet Eyes Wide Shut is all but absent from the end-of-the-year awards ceremonies and most critics lists.

The first thing to bear in mind are that this film was hyped way beyond necessity. As if the general public had any interest in the "Kubrick" listed below "Cruise" and "Kidman". To them this was just another Big Actor's next Big Movie. Passing it off like a "real Hollywood couple gets busy on the big screen" heightened expectations for something Kubrick wasn't trying to achieve. It suffered the same audience reaction as The Phantom Menace, and made only a fraction of the money.

Critics seemed to be lining up to take potshots at this film. Why? Recent history shows us that all of Kubrick's films from 2001 onward have been attacked critically, and subsequently hailed as classic years later. The same is true of most of Orson Welles' work. Few critics took the time to see this movie more than once before spewing their venom. A filmmaker like Kubrick is not going for direct emotional contact with the audience. He is aiming far deeper, asking the viewer to reflect on not only the images, but the themes, and the emotional investments of the characters. The subtlety is not something common in today's films, and something critics apparently can't process quick enough to meet a press deadline.

For all those complain that the film isn't sexy or erotic enough are missing the point completely. It's not about sex. It's about many other things, some of which linger in the background, some that aren't noticeable on the initial viewing. Kubrick raises questions about our institution of marriage, the nature of faith, commitment, temptation. That most in the audience weren't willing to meet Kubrick, Cruise, and Kidman halfway in this meditation isn't a comment on the quality on the filmmaking, it's a shortcoming of the sensory-deadened society. If Kubrick had been more in touch with today's film culture, would he have bothered to give us this complex of an experience? Let's thank him for his seclusion.

A NOTE on the DVD not being letterboxed: Kubrick (again, like Welles) preferred the aspect ratio of television, and left extra space in his frame for their widescreen theatrical showings (some are letterboxed on Home Video as well). The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut are meant to be seen in the full-screen standard format, and therefore aren't available in letterbox, so don't feel you're being cheated out of any compositional content. Unfortunately you are being cheated by Warner Bros' refusal to remove the digital figures blocking the orgy scenes, inserted for theatrical release to secure the "R" rating. Only in America...

Warner messes up with this release but it's still great
The Special Edition is a welcome release simply because it's the unrated, European, uncensored version of the film. I won't begin to review the film itself except to say that it's probably Kubrick's least appreciated and most underrated film--undeservedly so-- I personally think it's just as brilliant as his other works. See it more than once before you decide.

That said, the new Warner release has some flaws. The disk is supposed to contain BOTH versions of the film (unrated and rated), but it ONLY contains the unrated version (better that than just the rated one!). But the packaging says it contains both, so there's a big boo-boo. Also, it was originally advertised that the film would contain commentary by Sydney Pollack and someone else-- but there is no commentary on the film (and it doesn't say as such on the packaging... so it must have been decided not to include it for some reason). Nevertheless, it was originally touted in press releases that it would have commentary that I was looking forward to hearing.

After that, the extras a excellent and the movie looks great. But someone at Warner Home Video needs to have a reprimanding! :)

Good News, Kubrick and HD Fans
Kubrick's final effort is also his greatest masterpiece: a humane and expressionistic fable, endlessly complex and guardedly optimistic.
A few notes about the HD DVD of "Eyes Wide Shut:"
This is the unrated version of the film, meaning it does not have those CGI figures added to the orgy scenes to obscure the simulated sex. (The CGI figures were added in order to secure a U.S. theatrical release rating of "R," without Kubrick's input; their only purpose was censorship. This unrated version, which was released theatrically in Europe but until now has not been available in the U.S., restores those shots to the way Kubrick filmed them.)
The HD disc contains all of the special features which appear on the 16x9 standard-definition DVD in the new boxed set, and they are interesting enough. The aspect-ratio of the HD DVD is 16x9, which is a vast improvement over the old 3x4 DVD, as 16x9 is much closer to the theatrical aspect-ratio for which the film's shots were composed. The High-Definition film transfer is beautiful, pristine, the images luminous and rich. For a film as beautifully photographed as this, in which the texture of the image conveys essential, visceral meaning, the difference between High-Definition and Standard Def might make the difference between fully receiving the film and not.
If you've gone HD and are thinking of buying this to replace your old standard-def 3x4 DVD, by all means do so. Short of a new 35mm print of the unrated version, this HD disc -- displayed on a big 1080 set in a dark room, uninterrupted -- is how this challenging and ultimately thrilling film should be seen, and seen again.