Nobody can see the film without inhabiting that dismay. I think Kubrick made a film that whispered to Kidman: you are a real actor, a sexual phenomenon - and he is not. It’s as if the divorce between the leading players is the ending it needs. "Eyes Wide Shut" ends with huge uncertainty and the feeling of a psychic load not quite delivered. Not that it is easy to see why six days were needed to get it all done. Not that it had to be as graphic as it is. It is an important part of the arc of the film.
I do not mean to suggest that the scene is gratuitous or unnecessary. The restraint of the film-making process, its etiquette, is wondrous. There was also a scene in which he administered cunnilingus to her, in some detail, for which she wore a pubic wig. There was a scene in a bath, for instance. Many situations were shot that do not figure in the film. Kubrick would operate the camera himself. Thomson speculates, along the lines of those "unsubstantiated rumors" in the Star, that Kubrick set out to undermine the Kidman/Cruise marriage as part of his directorial strategy for the film, including nude sex scenes shot with Kidman and her character's memory/fantasy lover: Oh, Tom, I must take Nicole away to somewhere private. Alas, this has to be done away from your husband. He says, I have to talk to you privately, intimately, because I have to talk to you about the way your desires - your desires, Nicole - may merge with and give body to your character. Ī director is an interloper if he is male and his actress is married. The couple successfully sued the Star in relation to these allegations. Together, the extended schedule and the natural blood lust of the British press towards celebrities promoted unsubstantiated rumours that Cruise and Kidman required some psychological and sexual education to do their work.
(Not that I can be there to witness it - or stop imagining it.)Thomson also speculates about what might have happened on the set of " Eyes Wide Shut," in this excerpt from the book published in the Sunday Times of London: “I dare say she wakes up some nights screaming because she felt it was about to happen. “Just as I take the breakup with Cruise as the liberating and altering experience in Kidman’s life, so we have to see that Tom was changed, too." That’s why I’m writing this book, I think, to honor desire." I suspect she is as fragrant as spring, as ripe as summer, as sad as autumn and as coldly possessed as winter. “I should own up straightaway that, yes, I like Nicole Kidman very much.
#Thomson dictionaries neede series#
"He's a well-respected film writer and she accepted the interview only because she was under the impression he was writing a series of film essays."So, if Thomson is going to write about movie-fed fantasies, and he's decided to focus his on Nicole Kidman, what are his ethical responsibilities when it comes to soliticiting her unknowing cooperation in his enterprise? A review in the New York Times, which calls the ostensible biography "a weird and unseemly mash note," offers several quotes from the book, including: She has only spoken to him briefly on the phone about her acting processes and various films. Last week, Kidman's reps said Thomson had misrepresented himself in the one telephone interview he did with Kidman for his ostensible biography, being sold under the title "Nicole Kidman." From The Daily Mail:Īccording to the star's publicist Wendy Day: "Nicole has never met David Thomson. But I'm not sure his treatment, or imaginative possession (sexual and otherwise), of his not-at-all-obscure objects of desire is any less tabloid-creepy because it is presented as critical nonfiction rather than as gossip or on some fanatical fan blog, except that Thomson's writing is better.
In the introduction to his best-known book, the idiosyncratic and provocative "A Biographical Dictionary of Film," he admits that, in writing about movies, he is unavoidably writing about himself - and, indeed, the book might be better titled "An Autobiographical Dictionary of Film." All film criticism (and all writing, fiction or "non-fiction") is to some degree autobiographical, and Thomson has been more aggressive and up-front about his obsessions with his fantasy-objects, from Warren Beatty to Nicole Kidman, than most. Thomson is a cinephile, a fantasist and an autobiographer, who writes about movies - and the characters in them, and the people who make them - as his possessions, imagined aspects of himself. Nor is he a journalist or a biographer or a historian by any traditional definition of those terms. David Thomson, or "David Thomson"? Critic or stalker?ĭavid Thomson is often described as a "film critic," but film criticism is not quite what he does.
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