Eyes Wide Shut (18) General release
World cinema lost one of its most gifted and most visionary artists in March with the untimely death of Stanley Kubrick, leaving an output that, amounting to just 13 feature films over 43 years, was less prolific than his admirers would have liked, but was truly remarkable. His posthumously-released final work, Eyes Wide Shut, was shot, as were all his later films, under the strictest secrecy and over an inordinately long production period while the rumour mill went into overdrive with titbits of speculation regarding the movie's sexual content, an element misleadingly hyped up by its provocative trailer. The film is nowhere as sexually explicit as we had been led to believe.
Frederic Raphael, who collaborated on the Eyes Wide Shut screenplay with Kubrick, jumped on the bandwagon with his smug, shallow book, Eyes Wide Open. One of the few illuminating aspects of that book - for those unfamiliar with the movie's source material - is just how closely Eyes Wide Shut adheres to that source, Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 Freudian novella, Traumnovelle (Dream Story), which has been transposed from turn-of-the-century Vienna to present-day New York City.
It begins in the smart Central Park home of Dr Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) as they prepare to attend a lavish party hosted by their affluent friend, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). At the party Alice is seductively propositioned by an older Hungarian man, while Bill is tempted by two flirtatious fashion models before he is summoned upstairs by Ziegler to treat a naked young woman who has overdosed on a cocktail of drugs.
Back at their apartment, Alice, emboldened by smoking pot, reveals to Bill how attracted she was to a naval officer during their Cape Cod vacation that summer. In one of the many interruptions which punctuate the narrative, Bill is called out when one of his patients dies, and the dead man's daughter (Marie Richardson) takes Bill aback when she makes a pass at him.
There is another interruption, when her fiance (Thomas Gibson) arrives, and Bill, still smouldering with sexual jealousy after his wife's revelation, goes off on a nocturnal odyssey marked by a succession of opportunities for carnal knowledge - with a prostitute (Vinessa Shaw), an under-age girl (Leelee Sobieski) whose father is pimping for her, and in one of the movie's elaborate set-pieces, at a masked orgy out on Long Island. That orgy sequence attracted the wrath of the US ratings board, the MPAA, which appears to have no qualms about violence and gun culture but takes the scissors to sexual content, and the US version employs digitally imposed imagery to obscure 65 seconds of that sequence. Seeing the film here, where it is showing uncut and undoctored, the ritualistic orgy sequence registers as dated, out-of-time - and resolutely anti-erotic.
The official story is that Kubrick had signed off on his definitively final cut of the film just days before he died, but one wonders. As it builds towards its conclusion the film is lumbered with an over-extended and loquacious encounter which, most unusually for a Kubrick opus, seriously underestimates the audience's intelligence as it archly explains the self-evident. However, Eyes Wide Shut remains a wholly absorbing experience as it reflects on, and probes into, the secret desires of an ostensibly ideal couple - into questions of trust, yearning, temptation, guilt, suppression, fidelity and jealousy - and the masks people wear even in their most intimate personal relationships.
The casting of cinema's most famous married couple, Cruise and Kidman, adds multiple frissons to the movie's exploration of these themes. Although Kubrick lived surrounded by women, his second wife and his daughters, his work rarely offered roles of much substance to actresses. A rare exception is that of Redmond Barry's scheming, single-minded mother, brilliantly portrayed by the late Irish actress Marie Kean in Barry Lyndon.
Another, is the female lead in this film, played by Nicole Kidman, who perfectly catches the aura of a woman whose sensual nature appears to have remained untapped in an otherwise loving relationship. Never is this more vividly captured than in her stoned delivery of the erotic monologue which triggers off her husband's long night's journey into day.
Although Tom Cruise is onscreen virtually throughout the movie, his function is essentially that of the prism through which that eventful night is observed. The impeccable supporting cast notably includes Alan Cumming in a scene-stealing scene as a hotel desk clerk who zealously comes on to Cruise's character, and Sydney Pollack as the oily Ziegler who is the personification of corrupt power.
The movie's dream-like atmosphere is heightened by its grainy imagery, lighting that at times recalls the eerieness of The Shining, and Kubrick's characteristic, immaculate tracking shots and Steadicam work. Although set entirely in New York, the film was shot on meticulously recreated Manhattan sets on a sound stage at Pinewood Studios outside London. The movie effectively used Jocelyn Pook's original music in a soundtrack which blends Shostakovich, Mozart and Chris Isaak, and aptly (and mischievously), standards such as I'm in the Mood For Love and Strangers in the Night.
It has been said that Kubrick's reclusive nature rendered him out of touch and remote from the realities of the modern world, and there is an element of truth in that which is underlined by his final film's intermittent lapses into naivete. Kubrick always seemed more focussed when not burdened with dealing with the present and one of the outstanding achievements in his brilliant career has been the time machine quality whereby he propelled audiences into the past (Barry Lyndon, Paths of Glory) and the future (2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange) in his greatest films. Eyes Wide Shut is not one of the great Stanley Kubrick films, but, despite the cavils noted here, it is an entrancing and accomplished one. And it concludes on, what was for Kubrick, an unusually optimistic note - before The End appears on the credits of a Kubrick film for, sadly, the last time.
Ravenous (18) Selected cinemas
When Milcho Manchevski, the Macedonian director of Before the Rain, was removed from the production of Ravenous shortly after it started shooting, one of the film's stars, Robert Carlyle, successfully encouraged his replacement by Antonia Bird, who had directed Carlyle in Safe, Face and Priest. Bird's appetite for provocative material certainly made her a suitable choice to direct Ravenous, a gory and eerie picture of cannibalism on a US army outpost in the 1840s, and she tackles the movie's gruesome material with undisguised relish.
Guy Pearce plays an army captain who, traumatised after surviving a bloody battle by playing dead, is posted to a desolate fort in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California where he and his fellow soldiers offer refuge to a stranger (Carlyle) who survived the aftermath of a snowstorm by eating his fellow travellers.
The screenplay by Ted Griffin (who wrote the recent Best Laid Plans) over-reaches itself with an agenda that embraces Native American mysticism and the ongoing expansion of America, which is archly described by Carlyle's character as "a country seeking to be whole, consuming all it can".
Ravenous operates more effectively within the Grand Guignol conventions of the horror movie, which Bird embellishes with several arresting set-pieces. It is shot in a muted colour scheme which reflects its grim settings and subject matter. The always reliable Pearce and Carlyle are joined in a solid, almost exclusively male cast by David Arquette, Jeffrey Jones and Jeremy Davies. The movie's unsettling atmosphere gains considerably from the adventurous score composed by Michael Nyman and Blur singer Damon Albarn.
The Fifth Province (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin; Kino, Cork
The recent report of the Film Industry Strategic Review Group identified a crucial problem when it pinpointed script development as a seriously neglected area of Irish film production. Belatedly opening today two years after it was first screened at Galway Film Fleadh, Frank Stapleton's The Fifth Province is a classic example of a film which, despite a more than capable cast and striking visual qualities, is consistently undermined by the weakness of its screenplay. Ironically, one of the movie's motifs is that it pokes fun at what it perceives as the cliches of Irish film. Attending a screenwriting workshop, a nervy and unconfident would-be writer, Timmy Sugrue, is advised several times to steer clear of the stereotypical themes of "Irish mothers, priests, sexual repression and the terrible depression of the rural life". Such industry in-jokes clearly held a certain incestuous appeal for many in the Galway audience two years ago, but, like the rest of the film, left me cold. Brian F. O'Byrne, a fine stage actor who received Tony nominations for his performances in Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Lonesome West, is saddled with the underwritten role of Timmy Sugrue, who lives with his deranged mother (Joan O'Hara) in a run-down Inisfree guest house. He has a crush on the Irish president (a black woman) and tells his dotty psychiatrist (Ian Richardson) that he has been afraid of getting pregnant. Working on a screenplay titled Rain, he catches the attention of the heavily-accented workshop tutor, Diana de Brie (Lia Williams) who uses "ze great shower sequence" from Psycho to demonstrate plotting and tension development. "Poor woman, she should have taken ze bath," she limply observes.
Several other irrelevant nods to Hitchcock's classic are strewn about this fractured and nonsensical exercise scripted by director Stapleton and Nina Fitzpatrick. In trying to do something different to the more conventional Irish narratives it satirises, it fails to engage on any level other than in the handsome visual compositions lit and shot by Bruno de Keyser. As it meanders through its inane scheme of things, the film makes repeated attempts at absurdist humour which fall hopelessly flat in what proves a singularly uninvolving experience.
The Polish Bride (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The winner of several awards on the festival circuit, this lowkey, intimately performed Dutch drama deals with a brutally beaten Polish immigrant, Anna (Monic Hendrickx), who has been lured into prostitution, and the taciturn Dutch farmer, Henk (Jaap Spijkers), who gives her a refuge in his home. Anna sorely misses the young daughter she left behind in Poland, while Henk, a man who enthusiastically expresses a love of the land, has financial problems after failing to keep up the repayments on his farm.
Sensitively directed by Karim Traida, an Algerian who moved to Holland and studied film there, The Polish Bride closely observes these two lonely people who, thrown together in a crisis, are gradually drawn towards each other. Given their language problems, the movie features minimal dialogue and relies on the expressive performances of its subtle leading players. Less than subtle is the rather perfunctory resolution.
Varsity Blues (15) General release
Less flashy in its visuals and editing than one might expect from an MTV Films production - although it is accompanied by a de rigueur incessant rock soundtrack - Varsity Blues is a quite amiable college football yarn set in a small town in Texas where the game takes precedence over everything else and the young players come under tremendous pressure as they approach the end of a near-perfect season. All the adults hope that the success of their sons will rub off on them - with the exception of the team's bull-headed, authoritarian coach (Jon Voight), a gum-chewing, squinty-eyed tyrant. James Van Der Beek (from Dawson's Creek) plays the idealistic, Vonnegut-reading quarterback who comes into conflict with the coach and waxes lyrical about the purity of the game and its potential for heroism.
Such unexpected outpourings and the agreeable playing of a good cast - which also includes Scott Caan, son of James, as the most rambunctious of the team - help elevate the movie above the admittedly low standards of the genre. Director Brian Robbins builds it smoothly towards the final game, against-the-clock nail-bitter whose outcome should come as no surprise to anyone who's ever seen an American sports picture.
Strangers on a Train (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The celebrations of Alfred Hitchock's centenary continue with the re-release in a new print of his riveting 1951 movie based on a Patricia Highsmith novel. In this thriller rooted in transference of guilt, two men meet aboard a train and one proposes that each conducts a murder on the other's behalf, leaving the police at a loss to establish the motives behind these apparently perfect crimes. The men are played by Farley Granger and, in his last completed screen role, Robert Walker, and this print is slightly different from the version originally released, notably in the greater emphasis on homosexual attraction when the two men first meet.
The Italian Job (General) Ster Century, Liffey Valley; UCI, Tallaght
Reissued to mark its 30th anniversary, this richly entertaining British comedy-thriller comfortably withstands repeated viewing. The late Peter Collinson, a former RTE director, briskly paces the action of a caper following a gold heist in Turin, which is masterminded by a suave criminal (Noel Coward) from inside a British prison cell. (The prison scenes were shot in Dublin, at Kilmainham.)
On the outside are wideboy Michael Caine, lecherous computer wizard Benny Hill and Mafia kingpin Raf Vallone. The dazzling stunt work, involving three dexterously handled Mini Minors, is expert, and the finale literally is a cliffhanger.
