Stanley Kubrick’s last movie came in 1999 with “Eyes Wide Shut,” and the venerated director actually died shortly after he showed the movie’s final cut to Warner Bros., the studio that produced it. Sadly, the ending is genuinely confusing and weird, which ends up blemishing the overall legacy of the film — and certainly, the ending doesn’t hit as hard as Kubrick’s other masterpieces like “The Shining” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.” So where does “Eyes Wide Shut” go wrong?
Based on a novella titled “Traumnovelle (Dream Story)” by Arthur Schnitzler, “Eyes Wide Shut” casts Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise (who were a couple in real life at the time) as Alice and Bill, a successful married couple living in New York who encounter a serious impasse in their marriage. When Alice tells Bill that she contemplated having an affair a year before the film’s main narrative begins, Bill is left reeling, at which point he gets involved in a sexual, shady secret society that hosts lavish, bawdy parties where powerful people can hide their indiscretions. A lot of truly wild stuff happens from that point on, and at the end of the movie, Bill discovers a mask from one of the parties in the bed he shares with Alice, and as they recover, she ends the movie with a genuinely bizarre line, saying the couple needs to do something as quickly as possible. What’s that, Bill asks? “F***,” Alice responds. Then the movie’s over.
Sure, it’s not the worst movie ending of all time, but it’s pretty tonally strange — and leaves the viewer with plenty of unsettling questions. “Eyes Wide Shut” is an engrossing film, but it doesn’t have a great ending.
