The first fifteen minutes are punishing. I was embarrassed as Zierra endlessly highlighted visual details and incongruities as if their significance was self-evident and expressed astonishment at the casting of members of the production in tiny roles as if there could be no logical explanation (or as if Kubrick had never done it before). It all seemed to confirm my fears that this was going to be another ROOM 237, complete with the dumb “intense” score grandiosely ratifying his declarations.
The doc improves when it moves to anecdotes about the production and post-production and delves into the contemporary press coverage, thanks to the new interviews and well-curated archival footage/recordings/clippings. Nothing particularly revealing (at least, not the claims for which there’s actual evidence), but the fact-driven material makes for an engaging chronicle. What I can say to the documentary’s credit is that I can tell it is the result of a lot of serious research, and it really does feel like something that was years in the making.
But my overall takeaway is that Zierra was alone with his subject for too long. When his narration veers from a straight recounting of record, which it does often, it lacks self-awareness and critical thinking. For every decent point he makes, he indulges in five dubious ones, and all with grave confidence. His skepticism is highly selective - I thought it was pretty rich when he unironically referred to the preoccupations of conspiracy theorists and over-analyzers of Kubrick’s work as if he stands apart from them. Of course I expect a film maker to have an angle, but what’s annoying about Zierra is that his content is as unabashedly speculative as his posture is neutral. It’s the documentary equivalent of that guy you know who rationalizes irresponsible statements as “just asking questions.”
This contradictory feel starts at the outset. Zierra declares that he saw a shot in the movie on opening night that was mysteriously missing thereafter, framing it as some sort of Rosetta stone. Midway through, he pays this off by identifying a well-known mistake (a fairly prominent reflection of a crew member in the bathroom mirror during the O.D. scene) from the initial run -- the “missing shot” is in fact the digital removal of a reflection. I don’t know if this dishonesty is to his audience or to himself, but it becomes a pattern. Zierra tells us that the oft-repeated reports that Warner Bros. chief execs loved the cut delivered by Kubrick were false, without troubling with a named source. Zierra opines as fact that the gay slurs the frat boys taunt Dr. Harford with was commentary by Kubrick on rumors about Cruise in the press. We learn that the traditional polarized critical reaction to the movie upon release was not merely a matter of critics misreading the movie, but actually the result of them falling into a cleverly designed trap that Kubrick “baited” them into. Backed by the rising crescendo of a string orchestra, Zierra matter-of-factly states that Kubrick was visually quoting shots from his other movies over a montage that reveals nothing of the sort.
It gets to the point where Zierra seems to be disagreeing with what his own documentary is saying when it doesn’t contribute enough to his hyperbolic, mythologizing position. For example, Leon Vitali gets asked why the names of collaborators turn up in the set design, which he reasonably speculates was just a bit of amusement on Kubrick’s part. Then humorless narration comes in to tell us that it just doesn’t “add up,” expressing incredulity that Kubrick could “cut corners” and “compromise.” (How in-jokes are an example of either is apparently so obvious that an explanation would be redundant.)
On top of the unwarranted authority the doc carries itself with is plain old cheesiness. I’ve mentioned the music, which belongs to an episode of CSI. Zierra alleges that in post-production, music was laid into a scene that Kubrick had already decided should be silent (Again: according to who?), and I only wish that apparent recognition of the power of minimalism extended to his own work. And I howled at this line from the narration: “What if what we thought was wrong, was actually right?” Rule of thumb: If you find yourself uttering a sentence like that and you’re not going for parody, something went terribly awry somewhere. Then the message TV HOAX was “decoded” from the eyechart, and I wondered where I got off comparing this favorably to ROOM 237. The closing “Here is what we learned” montage is so awed by its own Importance that it’s a comedy masterpiece.
Your mileage may vary, and whatever else this is, it’s still a meticulously constructed, feature-length documentary about EYES WIDE SHUT, so I can’t discourage fans of the movie from checking it out. There’s valuable stuff – one highlight is Leon Vitali discussing the direction Kubrick was planning to take the marketing campaign, counterpointed with the actual promotional decisions Warner Bros. made that were practically repudiations of his intentions. The influence on Kubrick by Max Ophüls, the connection to Arthur Schnitzler’s work beyond Traumnovelle, and the director’s interest in turn of the century Vienna is a justifiable exploration.
But I see more hard work than judgment here, and I think there was a much better version of this that stood down completely on the movie’s supposed meanings and instead functioned purely as an account of the project’s background, development, post-Kubrick completion, reception, and longer-term legacy. That documentary, which would hardly have been dry, and which it seemed like all the raw materials had been gathered for, is trapped somewhere in here, tainted by all the silly conspiracy stuff and the loftiness of a presenter who apparently knows better than what he’s actually seeing and hearing.
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