Eyes Wide Shut Critical Essay | Critical Review by Charles Whitehouse

Critical Review by Charles Whitehouse

SOURCE: “Eyes without a Face,” in Sight and Sound, Vol. 9, No. 9, September, 1999, pp. 38-9.

In the following negative review, Whitehouse considers Eyes Wide Shut staid and dated.

The dream interpreter is a kind of detective, and given the orgy of opinion about Eyes Wide Shut currently being enjoyed, let's use the detective's dictum and stick to the facts. The most shocking aspect of Eyes Wide Shut is not its long-anticipated sex scenes, but its fidelity to literature. No one expected such a faithful plot adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story (Schnitzler was a friend of Freud's)

Kubrick and screenwriter Frederic Raphael have changed the story's setting from fin de siécle Vienna to present day New York and added two major scenes. The first, near the beginning, is at a black-tie party where Tom Cruise's Dr William Harford gets his pal Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) out of a sticky...
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