Stanley Kubrick's final feature — released four months after his death, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, frequently considered one of the most-misunderstood films in modern American cinema.
Bill Harford is a Manhattan physician married to Alice, a former art gallery curator. The film's opening sequence establishes their marital working framework; they attend a Christmas party hosted by Bill's wealthy patient Victor Ziegler. At the party each separately encounters substantial sexual-interest from other party attendees; neither acts on the interest but both register the experience.
The film's central sequence — Alice's late-night confession to Bill about a substantial sexual fantasy she had experienced during a previous summer vacation — restructures their marital working framework. Bill is substantially destabilised by the confession; he leaves their apartment and begins a multi-day night-time journey through Manhattan that engages multiple sexual-encounter possibilities but does not consummate any of them.
The film's central encounter — Bill's discovery of and infiltration into a masked-elite sexual ceremony at a Long Island estate — is one of the most-discussed sequences in modern American cinema. The film's final sequence — Bill and Alice's marital reconciliation, the cumulative reflection on what their respective experiences across the film mean, and the closing line ('Fuck' as Alice's final word) — operates as one of the most-deliberately-ambiguous closing sequences in modern major-studio commercial cinema.
Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story) is the source material for Eyes Wide Shut. The novella engages early-20th-century Viennese marriage-and-jealousy material; Kubrick's adaptation translates the working framework into late-1990s New York. The structural translation substantially modifies the source material's specific cultural register but maintains its core working subject matter (marriage, sexual jealousy, dream-and-reality boundary).
Kubrick reportedly developed the adaptation across approximately three decades before the eventual 1996-1999 production. The extended development framework substantially shaped the eventual film; Kubrick's specific working approach to the Schnitzler material had evolved substantially across the multi-decade pre-production period. The cumulative working result is, in some sense, the most-personal entry in Kubrick's filmography; the film engages material that Kubrick had been developing across his entire mature working career.
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were, at the time of the film's production, married. The marriage substantially shaped the broader production framework; Kubrick reportedly conducted extensive working development with both performers across the broader pre-production period to develop the specific marital-character working dynamic the film required. The cumulative working result is, by general assessment, substantially stronger performance work than either performer had previously delivered.
The structural significance of the casting is that the film's marital-working-dynamic material required substantial working chemistry between the performers; conventional acting frameworks typically do not engage marital-working-dynamic material at the level of intimacy the film required. The Cruise-Kidman casting permitted a specific working framework that conventional casting would not have supported. The cumulative working result substantially exceeded conventional commercial-cinema marital-drama production.
Stanley Kubrick died on 7 March 1999, approximately four months before the film's eventual 16 July 1999 commercial release. The death substantially shaped the broader reception of the film; the release was framed as Kubrick's working testament rather than as conventional commercial release.
The post-Kubrick-death MPAA rating process — which required substantial digital alteration of the central masked-ceremony sequence to obtain the commercial R rating — produced substantial controversy. The digitally-altered sequence was eventually restored to its original Kubrick-approved version in subsequent home-video releases. The structural lesson is, in some sense, the specific challenges of post-director-death commercial release for working directors whose specific working framework had operated across their entire mature careers. Few major directors of Kubrick's generation experienced similar post-death commercial-release frameworks.