“Eyes Wide Shut” (1999)
Some, including many when the film actually opened, believed that the story behind the making of “Eyes Wide Shut” was more interesting than the film itself: in the works for over thirty yeras to one degree or another, holding a record for the longest continuous shoot in film history, over fifteen months, marking the final film from master Stanley Kubrick, who died six days after completing his final cut, the subject of MPAA ratings wranglings, and starring one of the most talked-about real couples in the world, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Those people are wrong. Kubrick’s adaptation of of an Arthur Schnitzler’s novel is a rich and remarkable tale, delving into the dark sexuality behind the closed doors of American life, a lavish, sinister (and a little prudish in some ways) and even over close to three hours, impressively sustained picture that deserves its place among its director’s remarkable canon. And as much as the film gained attention for having the golden couple toplining, its undeniably Cruise’s film. He’s one of cinema’s great observers, and Kubrick takes full advantage of that here, even as the actor shows both the morality, and the potential for darkness, within his Everyman character.
Worst
“Far & Away” (1992)
This fall’s release of Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” is being billed as the widest 70mm release in twenty-five years, which is certainly something to get excited about. But what’s being left off the press releases is that the last movie to get that kind of release was “Far & Away,” a duff would-be epic from Ron Howard. The second team-up of couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, with the former as a poor Irish boy who ends up fleeing with the daughter of his landlord (Kidman) to the United States, taking them from boxing and burlesque dancing in New York to the rush out West in Oklahoma. It’s a slightly less authentic portrait of the immigrant experience than “An American Tail,” an awkward mix of tones (betraying writer Bob Dolman’s background in comedy) and given a fundamentally shallow, vanilla treatment by Ron Howard, the most shallow and vanilla of prestige filmmakers, even if Mikael Salomon’s lavish big-canvas photography go some way to redeeming things. And sadly, the central performances are the worst thing about the whole affair: the 1990s saw a series of ropey Irish accents from Hollywood (“Mary Reilly,” “Michael Collins”), but few worse than Cruise & Kidman’s here.
“Cocktail” (1988)
God help us, there was a time when, our unformed brains having been subjected to Roger Donaldson‘s “Cocktail” at far too young an age, we had vague memories of it not being total tripe. But watching it with adult eyes, the scales quickly fall: it may have cemented Cruise’s reputation as a heartthrob for teenage girls, but that just proves either how undiscerning that audience was back then or just how hot Cruise could be, that his charms could shine through this turgid, banal, sexist script, and the self-involved, stupendously entitled, irritating character he plays. As the cocky barman taken under the wing of an aging alcoholic misogynist (Bryan Brown, awful) Cruise gets to parrot delightful lines like “Well, it wouldn’t be any fun if [women] just fell on the ground with their legs in the air, would it?” and hippy-hippy-shakes up terrible “poetry” and nasty-looking drinks in roughly equal measure. It’s an unabashed star vehicle, designed for maximum shit-eating grin and grandstanding potential that became a hit despite being as vacuous and synthetic as its horrible signature soundtrack cut — “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys. If you want to feel sorry for a decade, watch “Cocktail,” and weep for the 80s.