The Underappreciated Comedy Of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’

Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is a lot of things; an erotic thriller, a marital melodrama, and a Christmas fable but with an Illuminati orgy instead of three ghosts. It’s also very funny at times, something some audiences perhaps haven’t always fully appreciated …
In many ways, Eyes Wide Shut plays like a dark comedy more than it does a serious drama – after all, the basic formula of the story is practically a carbon copy of a teen sex comedy. Think about it: a sexually frustrated dude jumps through a bunch of crazy hoops in order to get to a killer party where he can finally get laid? Not to mention the meta-gag of casting American heartthrob and former Risky Business star Tom Cruise as the handsome doctor who just can’t seem to get any action no matter how hard he tries.

Our protagonist’s psychosexual odyssey even begins with the type of farcical misunderstanding you’d expect to see at a dinner party thrown by Frasier Crane. Nicole Kidman’s character, Alice, accuses her husband, Bill (Cruise), of sleeping with two young women at a holiday party – in reality, he quietly slipped away to help their host revive an overdosing sex worker but is bound by secrecy. The ensuing argument leads a stoned Alice to confess that she once fantasized about leaving her family for a hunky sailor, then pushing Cruise on being oblivious to his patients’ sexual attraction to him, which comes out in a near-vaudevillian monologue.
The Underappreciated Comedy Of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’