The Big Picture
Cruise’s role in
Eyes Wide Shut
challenges his action-hero image, portraying vulnerability and insecurity in a surreal and thought-provoking manner.
The film delves into male ego, desire, and insecurity, emphasizing the struggle to reconcile reality with unattainable fantasies.
Cruise’s character faces a dark night of the soul, grapples with emotions of shame and guilt, ultimately seeking reconciliation and a quiet domestic life.
On July 16, 1999, Stanley Kubrick’s greatly anticipated final film, Eyes Wide Shut, was released. Kubrick passed away a few months before the movie came out, and it remains one of the auteur’s most provocative, controversial, and astonishing contributions to the cinematic art form. The film stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, at the time married in real life and playing a couple on-screen, as a doctor and his wife who admits she has considered having an affair. The revelation sends Cruise’s Dr. Bill Harford into a tailspin through the dead of night in New York City as he wanders around looking for sexual gratification, and seeking a greater sense of control over his own life.
Eyes Wide Shut
A Manhattan doctor embarks on a bizarre, night-long odyssey after his wife’s admission of unfulfilled longing.
Release Date July 16, 1999
Director Stanley Kubrick
Runtime 159
Main Genre Drama
Studio Warner Bros.
‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Was an Interesting Departure From Tom Cruise’s Usual Roles
Cruise’s 1999 was an interesting point in his career, as he also starred in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, which released a few months later. In the years since, he has not appeared in many strictly dramatic roles, opting instead for primarily action oriented films. Two auteurist directors were able to center these challenging, three-hour long, adult dramas around his acting talent, and there are not many other examples of actors who have managed to pull that off in such a short span of time. Although the release year is admittedly somewhat arbitrary, since Eyes Wide Shut was in development for nearly six years and filmed for 400 days –– breaking the record for longest film shoot in history. It is eerie that Kubrick passed away so soon after completing the final edits on the film, considering how lengthy the production was.
Kubrick plays with Cruise’s movie star persona in an interesting way, as the Cruise we know as the cocky hotshot in Top Gun or The Color of Money is nowhere to be found, neither is the heroic posture he delivered a few years earlier in Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, a role which has gone on to define his career as he returned to the franchise for the seventh installment in 2023. Instead, Cruise is up against the ropes. He is lost, vulnerable, and desperate to heal his broken ego. Kubrick puts Cruise in a world where he is vastly in over his head. Even when Cruise is in over his head, he is typically able to craftily maneuver a fighter jet or a motorcycle to speed his way past any conflict, but in Eyes Wide Shut, there are no easy solutions to the problems he is facing.
Tom Cruise Must Face the Fragility of His Ego in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’
Dr. Bill Harford seemingly has it all at the start of Eyes Wide Shut, but if you look closer it is not the case. Yes, he is attending an incredibly lavish Christmas party, he seems to have a happy family unit, and he is a successful doctor. However, he feels out of touch at this party, he is disconnected from his wife, and while he is rich, he is realizing there is a more elite class from which he is entirely shut out. Tragic events involving a young woman overdosing while with the party’s host, portrayed by Sydney Pollack who previously directed Tom Cruise in The Firm, and the revelatory post-party conversation with his wife lead Cruise on a dark journey through the streets of New York. Each city block or ornate room is given an otherworldly glow thanks to the over-saturation of Christmas lights filling the frame.
The visual choices combined with the ambiguous and surreal tone place Cruise in very unfamiliar settings where he walks a liminal tightrope between dreaming and reality. The discoveries he makes are challenging, as events unfold in such a way that he ends up at a secretive party where a sexual ritual is performed, after an invitation from his friend played by Todd Field, actor-director who would go on to collaborate with Cate Blanchett in TÁR (Blanchett also happens to have a voice cameo appearance in Eyes Wide Shut). This ritual gone awry leads Cruise to some dangerous situations as the individuals involved go to great lengths to stop him from speaking about or acknowledging what had taken place in any shape or form, especially after he seems to uncover that a woman may have been murdered as a part of the ritual.
Whether the disturbing events that play out in the film are meant to be taken at face value, they prove two things to Cruise’s character. Either he must accept that his fantasies are so outlandish and embrace his reality where life is a lot more… normal, or these things he aspires to be a part of are far outside what he is capable of handling. This is not only with regard to the sexual encounters he approaches, but also his idyllic perspective on what his marriage should be, or his desire to attain vast wealth and enter into an even higher status than that of a successful doctor. His ego was bruised by his wife’s revelation early in the film, but the experiences he seeks out to repair it end up mangling it even further.
‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Subverts Expectations of a Leading Man
Considering his breakdown toward the end of the film when he realizes his wife knows about the events of the previous days, it is clear Cruise understands he is out of his depth and feels a wide range of emotions including shame, guilt, inadequacy, and fear regarding his future. Cruise’s role grapples with one of the greatest fears the male ego can confront, the notion that not even his masculine bravado can control or uncover the thoughts the women in his life choose to keep from him. The insecurity seeps through his performance as it becomes clear how even in marriage there are still things people will keep from each other, and he has no power to challenge that. This is a rare form to see Cruise in, and he handles these outbursts just as well as he handles traversing rooftops at impossible speeds or clinging to the side of airplanes.
Ultimately, Cruise is put through this dark night of the soul and comes out of it in a place where he and his wife can maybe set aside the collision of ego, desire, and insecurity, and enjoy a quiet domestic life together. It is kind of a happy ending… but it’s a distorted one, but Cruise allows the opportunity to relinquish all of his troubled experiences over the last few days by accepting the life he has and attempting to reconcile with Kidman in the final moments of the film.
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Kubrick disarms our understanding of what a typical leading man should be through his treatment of Bill Harford’s character. Cruise is uncomfortable, weird, and stripped down –– both literally and metaphorically –– in Eyes Wide Shut. This type of role is a challenging one for any actor to play, but especially difficult in the hands of someone with such massive celebrity status that audiences have certain expectations attached to his involvement in a film. Maybe in 1999, it did not seem quite as bizarre (although most definitely still bizarre considering the subject matter dealt with), but in retrospect Eyes Wide Shut is something quite rare for such a towering movie star to tackle with the confidence and image-conscious attitude Cruise brings to the part.
Although the film remains one of his most challenging and controversial, it is also one of the best outings Cruise has given as an on-screen performer. Some actors may have an easier time riding a motorcycle off a cliff for a film than getting into the right head space to portray such a vulnerable person. As the Mission: Impossible series continues, and Cruise shows no signs of slowing down his life as an action-junkie, we can hope he might return one day to a film as surreal, complicated, and thoughtful as Eyes Wide Shut.
Eyes Wide Shut is available to rent or buy on Apple TV+
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