Is This A Christmas Movie? ‘Eyes Wide Shut’

Inspired by the annual debate about whether or not Die Hard should be considered a Christmas movie, Is This A Christmas Movie? is a limited series that tries to determine whether or not some famous films set at Christmas should be considered Christmas movies.

After years of secrecy, a seemingly endless production process, and its director’s unexpected death, Eyes Wide Shut arrived in theaters in the heat of the summer in 1999. Its first viewers didn’t know what to expect. The film’s teaser trailer offered little beyond a Chris Isaak song, the names of stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and director Stanley Kubrick, and intriguing flashes of bedroom, New York streets, and a forbidding mansion. What they got was, among other things, a film swimming in Christmas decorations.

Eyes Wide Shut opens, after watching its married protagonists Bill (Tom Cruise) and Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) get dressed, at an elaborate Christmas party thrown  by the wealthy Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). It closes at a massive, FAO Schwarz-like store swarming with children toy-crazed children. In between, Bill wanders a New York filled with Christmas decorations, from his medical office to the luxurious home of recently deceased patient to the “cozy” apartment of a prostitute to a diner that doesn’t really look like the kind of place that would still exist in late-’90s New York. (Then again, the New York of the film, recreated in the U.K., often feels like a mix of the actual city and the Bronx-born Kubrick’s decades old memories of the place.) There’s a lot of Christmas in the movie. One Kubrick fan even made a video of every Christmas tree featured in the film. But is it a Christmas movie?

That’s a tough question, one tougher than most subjects of this column. Superficially, it certainly qualifies. There are so many Christmas lights in the movie it’s hard not to feel pangs of sympathy for those charged with putting them all in place and arranging them to meet Kubrick’s demanding standards. The shooting of Eyes Wide Shut stretched from November of 1996 through June of 1998. Would a film set over Memorial Day weekend have taken so long to make?

Yet, for most of the film, the Christmas backdrop seems to be just that: a backdrop. It pays more attention to less seasonal matters. At the party, both Alice and Bill receive sexual propositions, she from a smooth-talking Hungarian playboy, he from a pair of models. Neither acts on them. Alice demurs and Bill gets called away to deal with Ziegler’s OD’ing mistress before we learn his decision. A day later, recalling the night before, a super stoned Alice shares an erotic memory of being so powerfully attracted to a Naval officer that she imagined herself capable of leaving Bill and their child.

At this point, Bill cracks. Heading off into the night, Bill discovers that New York is actually a kind of nightmarish erotic wonderland filled with horny mourners, cheery prostitutes, a costume shop whose owner doubles as a pimp for his underage daughter and, a few miles outside of city limits, a mansion that’s home to an orgy/secret rite in which robed, mask-clad attendees have extremely solemn, athletic sex on what’s presumably stain-resistant antique furniture.

Responses to Eyes Wide Shut tend to fall into two camps: Those left puzzled that Bill and Alice’s marriage could be thrown into a crisis so easily and find Bill’s journey through the sexual underworld kind of absurd, and those who fall under the spell of Kubrick’s hypnotic filmmaking and see the absurdity a key part of what is — dead bodies, creepy masks and all — essentially a dark comedy set in motion by one man’s extremely fragile ego.

But did it have to take place at Christmas? A slightly different version of Eyes Wide Shut might have made more sense as a Christmas movie. Writing about his experiences collaborating with Kubrick, Frederic Raphael recalled Kubrick asking him to remove any suggestions Bill and Alice might be Jewish, as some have inferred of their analogous characters in the film’s source material, the 1926 novella Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler. Throughout the film, Bill discovers a world of elite privilege he never imagined existed, and which ultimately doesn’t allow him to enter. For a Jewish protagonist, all those Christmas decorations could serve as yet another suggestion that the Christian-dominated culture will always view him as an outsider no matter how much he achieves. Kubrick had toyed with adapting Dream Story for decades and, in the early ’70s, even toyed with making it with Woody Allen in the lead.

That’s not the film he ended up making, however. So the Christmas lights strewn everywhere — except, maybe tellingly, at the orgy scene — must mean something else, if they mean anything at all. Yet, for much of the film, they don’t seem to mean much, nor does Christmas play an active role in the film. When the costume shop owner wishes Bill a “Merry Christmas” after suggesting he could sleep with his daughter for the right price, it mostly seems to be there to underscore his awfulness.

Then there’s the final scene, in which Bill and Alice decide to keep their marriage alive over the course of an intense toy store conversation. It’s here it becomes clear that if Die Hard is, at heart, a movie about a man attempting to repair his family in time for Christmas that also features him killing a bunch of gun-toting bad guys, Eyes Wide Shut is the story of a man who has to work to keep his family together after trying, and failing, to throw himself into a life of sexual abandon. The film might be fundamentally puritanical. It’s a world in which flirting with models puts you on a slippery slope that leads to Sydney Pollack trying to explain away the death of a former beauty queen over scotch and billiards. Inside marriage there’s stability and safety. Outside it’s a raging storm of disease, perversion, and murderous hedonists. But it’s also sincere about its puritanism and its insistence on the importance of family — maybe even a little hokey about it. Almost like a Christmas movie, when you think about it.

Verdict: Ultimately, yes, even if its Christmas movie-ness doesn’t become apparent until the final moments. That also makes it the only Christmas movie to end with an F-bomb, which feels appropriate, really.

Keith Phipps writes about movies and other aspects of pop culture. You can find his work in such publications as The Ringer, Rolling Stone, Vulture, and The Verge. Keith also co-hosts the podcasts The Next Picture Show and Random Movie Night and lives in Chicago with his wife and child. Follow him on Twitter at @kphipps3000.

Where to stream Eyes Wide Shut