Dickens, with orgies: why Eyes Wide Shut is the ultimate adults-only Christmas film

Fancy a masked orgy this Christmas? High-society doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his disengaged wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) have obligations: lavish balls to attend, presents to wrap and buy for their little daughter, Helena. Their feigned enthusiasm for any of it crumbles, after a bitter row in which Alice reveals she once toyed with infidelity and breaking up their marriage. Bill goes on a long, dark night of the soul, becoming a voyeur in the debauched sex lives of others, and getting absolutely none himself, despite several opportunities.

Like Die Hard, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was given a July release when it came out in 1999, but there’s almost no avoiding its seasonal setting, and even less avoiding Kubrick’s firm intentions in decking the halls. Nearly every new location – whether it’s the Harfords’ palatial apartment on Central Park West or a sex worker’s pad in the Village – brings us a freshly decorated tree, if not several: the baubles wink out seductively from every corner.

It goes without saying that this is hardly an arbitrary choice – nothing in Kubrick ever is. Adapting the 1926 source text with the help of Frederic Raphael – Arthur Schnitzler’s erotic fantasia Dream Story – Kubrick moved the setting from early 20th century Vienna to a dreamlike simulacrum of modern-day Manhattan, even if he barely set foot there in this Pinewood-based production. But he also moved the time period: instead of taking place over Mardi Gras, the story unfolds over three days during the Christmas run-up.

Far from being an assault on the classic structures of a Christmas story, it adopts them very consciously. Bill’s nocturnal odyssey has the rollercoaster outline of A Christmas Carol, confronting him just as starkly with the emptiness of his own affluence. But there’s also (I’m not kidding) a Home Alone 2: Lost in New York quality to his solo adventures. (Instead of Tim Curry as a suspicious hotel concierge, we get Alan Cumming as a flirty one.) No wonder London’s Prince Charles Cinema shows a radiant 35mm print of Kubrick’s film several times in December each year: it’s creeping up on us now as an unmistakable part of the Christmas canon, as surely as Scrooged.

Kubrick’s forensic dissection of the marital bond might not sound 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 desperation constantly underlying Meet Me In St Louis (1944) (original lyrics: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas / It may be your last…”). None of the great Christmas films, surely, are only out to endorse ritualised spending and bombard us with carols. They put life to a pretty fierce test, before coming to land with hard-earned consolations.

The juxtaposition of Christmas and sex is rarer in art – we’re meant to be celebrating a virgin birth, after all. This was Kubrick’s main provocation. But sex is commercialised here as much as anything else: witness the cash passing hands between Bill and Vinessa Shaw’s street walker, Domino; or the centrepiece orgy at an upstate mansion, only accessed by the uber-rich; or the costume-shop owner (Rade Šerbedžija) who’s pimping out his own underage daughter (Leelee Sobieski) to creepy clients. Carnality is deprived of passion throughout (except in Bill’s most paranoid imaginings about his wife). Because of the economics in play, Eyes Wide Shut’s vision of sex feels as empty of feeling as corporate Secret Santa.

Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut

After all this furtive intrigue, Kubrick concludes with the shopping trip Bill and Alice have been putting off: the most sumptuous Christmas toy-shop visit cinema can buy, shot in Hamleys. The last word in the film belongs to Kidman (who gets the last word in most of her scenes). It’s the F-word, more commonly uttered in Hamleys when you get to the cash register.

Kidman means it as an invitation – to her then-husband, of course, whom she would divorce two years later – to start again, put meaning back into their marriage. It’s “something very important that we need to do as soon as possible”. Eyes Wide Shut is perhaps the one film ballsy enough to venture that Christmas is a gaudy distraction from our sex lives – a bad excuse to give up.

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