Dickens with orgies: why Eyes Wide Shut is the best Christmas movie for adults only

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut Photo: Warner Bros.

Wanna have a masked orgy this Christmas? High-society doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his estranged wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) have obligations to attend lavish balls and wrap and buy gifts for their young daughter Helena. Their feigned enthusiasm for it all crumbles after a bitter argument in which Alice reveals that she once played with infidelity and ended their marriage. Bill spends a long dark night of the soul, becoming a voyeur into the depraved sex lives of others, while getting nothing himself, despite several opportunities.

Like Die Hard, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was released in July when it came out in 1999, but it's almost impossible to escape its seasonal setting, much less avoid Kubrick's determined intentions to deck the halls. Nearly every new location—whether it's the Harfords' luxury apartment on Central Park West or a sex worker's apartment in the Village—brings us a freshly decorated tree, if not several, with baubles twinkling seductively from every corner.

It goes without saying that this is hardly an arbitrary choice — nothing like that happens with Kubrick. Adapting Frederic Raphael's 1926 source text—Arthur Schnitzler's erotic fantasy The Story of Dreams—Kubrick moved the setting from early 20th-century Vienna to a dreamlike version of modern-day Manhattan, even if he barely set foot there in those pine forests. production. But it also shifted the time period: the action takes place not during Mardi Gras, but during the three days leading up to Christmas.

This is not an attack on the classic structures of the Christmas story, but a conscious application of them. Bill's overnight odyssey is reminiscent of the rollercoaster ride in A Christmas Carol, pitting him just as sharply against the emptiness of his own wealth. But there is also (I'm not kidding) Home Alone 2: Lost in New York with its solo adventures. (Instead of Tim Curry as the suspicious hotel concierge, we get Alan Cumming as the flirtatious one.) It's no wonder that London's Prince Charles cinema screens a gleaming 35mm print of Kubrick's film several times each December: it now sneaks up on us like an unmistakable part of the Christmas canon, as undoubtedly as Scrooged.

Kubrick's forensic examination of marital ties may not be like Christmas in a Box, but you could make the same argument for Jimmy Stewart's descent to the brink of suicide in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) or the despair that constantly underlies the film «Meet me in St. Louis.» Louis (1944) (original lyrics: «Have yourself a little Merry Christmas/This may be your last…»). None of the great Christmas movies, of course, are meant to just endorse ritual spending and bombard us with Christmas carols. Before coming to earth with hard-earned consolations, they subjected life to some rather cruel tests.

Juxtapositions of Christmas and sex in art are less common—after all, we are meant to celebrate the Immaculate Conception. This was Kubrick's main provocation. But sex here is as commercialized as anything else: see how money is transferred between Bill and Vinessa Shaw's street prostitution, Domino; or a central orgy in an upstate mansion that only the super-rich have access to; or a costume store owner (Rade Serbedzija) who pimps his underage daughter (Lelee Sobieski) to creepy clients. Lust is devoid of passion throughout (except in Bill's most paranoid fantasies about his wife). The economy makes Eyes Wide Shut's depiction of sex seem as hollow as corporate Secret Santa.

Tom Cruise with Eyes Wide Shut

After all this secret intrigue, Kubrick completes the shopping trip that Bill and Alice have been putting off: the most luxurious Christmas toy store you can buy in a cinema, filmed in Hamley. Kidman (who has the final say in most scenes) has the final say in the film. It's the F-word most commonly uttered in Hamleys as you approach the cash register.

Kidman means this as an invitation — to her then-husband, of course, from whom she would divorce two years later. – start again, bring meaning back to your marriage. This is “something very important that we need to do as soon as possible.” Eyes Wide Shut may be the only film bold enough to risk arguing that Christmas is a glaring distraction from our sex lives and a bad excuse to give up.