Contrary to some of the advance buzz (and even some of the reviews!), EYES WIDE SHUT is not about two psychiatrists or even two doctors, but Doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), an art dealer who has forgone a gallery to curate an apartment and child. At a party for the elite, where the couple know no one but the host (Sidney Pollack), discordance becomes an undertheme in their apparent harmony, a motif that will grow until it becomes the dominant chord (accented by a piano playing forte) in their lives for the next few days.

Alice, woozy with too much wine and dancing with a suave Eastern European who attempts to seduce her right on the dance floor, watches Bill, who finds himself sandwiched between two models who want to take him "to the end of the rainbow," hoping that he will watch her. He, though, is too sure of her to notice and, anyway, is soon called away to tend to a hooker who has overdosed on a speedball in his host's room. Back home, and slightly stoned, Alice's resentment of her husband's apparent smugness leads her to tell him about her past desire for a man whom she had only seen from a distance but for whom she would have given up everything. This abrupt shattering of Bill's illusions is reinforced when he is called to the deathbed of an elderly patient, where he hears a startling confession from the man's grown daughter. These two revelations send him off through the night and for the next few days on a journey into the desperate heart of the City Erotic.

Kubrick has often been accused of being cold and dispassionate about his subjects, and the charge is a just one. (It's no accident that BARRY LYNDON is by Thackery, the novelist-puppetmaster.) For all the physical and emotional passion in the film, most of it is given from the perspective of Bill, who remains a distant observer even while he obsesses about the image of his wife with another man. As in most of Kubrick's films, it is the details and what is unspoken that counts.  The lighting in a room, a painting of cat glimpsed only from the side, a dingy kitchen tile with a picture of a sliced apple--all become rich with nuance in the contexts of their scenes, even if you cannot quite explain them.

And more than any other Kubrick film I can think of, the film seems to bow to its own director's past: the jealousy of Elisha Cook, Jr. in THE KILLING, the labyrinths and ghost bar of THE SHINING, a street gang of toughs who are only less flashily dressed than Alex and his droogs in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, a nymphette out of LOLITA, masks from ACO and costumes out of BARRY LYNDON. EYES WIDE SHUT seems to be a summation of a career with an Afterword that puts a seal on it.  More than any other Kubrick film (with the possible exception of LOLITA) and despite its narrative detachment, EWS is the director's one film that comes closest to exploring human emotion from the inside.

Although Alice deserves more screen time, her revelation scene (a truly great performance by Kidman, by the way) and her final, closing word in the film give her more authority than any woman has had in any Kubrick film before.  And that authority, perhaps, is what makes EYES WIDE SHUT the most "hopeful" of all films by the screen's greatest misanthrope. Toward the end of the movie, everything seems to be explained in a scene that requires Bill (and us) to accept the explanation at face value. The dominance of elite male privilege that it suggests might have been a subject for exposure and/or despair in another director's hands--say, Alan Pakula or even Sidney Pollack himself some twenty years ago. But in its aftermath, Kubrick seems to say that salvation may be impossible on any social level (his only other answer before had to come from invisible aliens), but it can still be found one-on-one if you are willing to put aside what you think you know about life, to walk through the world with eyes wide shut.