"Risky Business" Still Feels Daring, and Relevant.

Nearly 35 years later, Risky Business seems hardly to have aged at all. It was the 80s’ answer to The Graduate, a youth comedy having an existential crisis, and featuring an emerging star, Tom Cruise, who even resembles Dustin Hoffman, especially when he sports a pair of dark sunglasses atop his hawkish nose. But there’s a difference between the actors, too: Hoffman has a subdued quality that he occasionally overcomes; Cruise is manic, perpetually revved up, which makes his character, the careful, obedient Joel Goodson, all the more inviting: When his parents go away for a week, Joel turns on the stereo and struts around the living room in his skivvies to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll”; it’s one of the sexiest moments in the movie, not to mention an iconic scene for the 80s.

Surely this was the moment when audiences knew a star had arrived. And say what you want about Tom Cruise (he’s taken a good bit of unfair shellacking from fans and critics for a long time): the man has star power. And he's totally believable. You have to stretch your imagination ever so slightly to believe that Dustin Hoffman’s in heat for Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, but we can practically feel Tom Cruise’s racing pulse when he encounters Lana, the upscale call girl who turns his life upside down.

When Lana, played by the startling, icy-tender Rebecca de Mornay, enters the Goodson residence (a stately WASP-nest in suburban Chicago), it’s like a fever dream, practically lifted from a horror movie, with an eerie wind blowing the French Doors open, and leaves rustling and spilling into the house, and Joel, vulnerable yet expectant, lying on the couch, waiting for his unknown lover to come and ravish him. (Not before he’s visited by a male escort in women’s clothes, in a surprisingly hip and amusing scene.)

Like Cruise, Rebecca de Mornay was unknown at the time Risky Business premiered, but her performance shapes the role into something meaningful and magnetic. She’s not a floozy. De Mornay gives Lana a cool, powerful moxie that is both a turn-on and a foil for Joel Goodson, the boy with too many desires and not enough outlets for them. He’s goaded by his buddy Miles (80s teen comedy favorite Curtis Armstrong, of Revenge of the Nerds), who gives Joel a big speech about letting go, saying, “what the fuck” every once-in-a-while. When Joel finally heeds these words, disaster after disaster unfolds: Lana purloins his mother’s priceless glass egg (a ridiculous accoutrement that sits on the living room mantel); Joel sinks his dad’s porsche into Lake Michigan; and, seeing an ideal market in Joel’s steamed-up high school buddies, Lana turns the Goodson house into a makeshift bordello. Risky Business has a deliciously complex view of American values, which are inherently hypocritical when it comes to sex: Joel imagines the police encircling his house because he’s got a girl in his bed; it’s sexual policing, and he’s been caught red-handed. (The neon sign burning over his window casts an X-rated hue over the night scenes in Joel’s bedroom.)

Risky Business has been advertised as a comedy for far too long, with that famous Tom Cruise underwear-dance suggesting a lightweight tone akin to Sixteen Candles. Not that I have anything against comedy, but Risky Business defies genre-labeling, and so to expect this movie to be Porky's, for instance, is to invite disappointment. Of course, the movie is funny at times (and its sensibility is often comical), but director Paul Brickman’s vision is darker and more complex. Unlike Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a movie that reinforces the underside of capitalism (because Ferris is a spoiled upper-middle-class kid with no conscience who gets everything he wants), Risky Business has a deep discomfort with the capitalistic age of the 80s, and Joel becomes a vehicle for that discomfort.

Joel’s teenage angst is transmuted into a deeper, richer kind of angst, one that will probably stay with him past his youth. He's afraid of the future, afraid of making a mistake, and it's pretty clear that in Joel's world, one slip-up could destroy everything else. If many of those lighter 80s comedies are beloved classics in their own right, Risky Business stands apart from them in that it’s more complicated and adult in its sensibility, and as such it asks more troubling questions, without pandering to its audience like The Breakfast Club, which concludes that teenagers are right about everything. Risky Business exposes the hypocrisy of adults without congratulating the adolescents for their purity: Most of them are just as corrupt, as we see in the scene when Joel’s friends announce their plans to “make a lot of money,” and he’s struck by their brazen materialism.

But that tug-of-war between making money and being happy–and making a contribution to the world–rumbles in Joel’s mind too. He’s terrified of ruining his life, of not getting into Princeton and making a good living, but he’s also terrified of becoming his parents. And Paul Brickman does not provide easy answers. If one of the marks of a great movie is its lingering effect on us, Risky Business may in fact be a great movie. This movie transfixes us, and we wonder about the characters. What became of them? What did they accomplish? Did they end up together or apart?

The absurd (and funny) ending (another iconic moment) when Joel must buy back all the furniture from his house, which has been stolen by a vengeful pimp named Guido (Joe Pantoliano), adds to the film's otherworldly, out-of-body-experience vibe. And Brickman uses Tom Cruise’s narration, conveying a cynical hopefulness, and Tangerine Dream’s great neon waterfall of a score, to great effect. It's hard not to fall under the spell of this movie, and so we too are walking around in a dreamlike state, just like Joel. It's like a John Hughes teen comedy mixed with a Michael Mann thriller with a little Buñuel surrealism thrown in for good measure. Risky Business has the makings of great pop cinema: it is distinctly American, it is cool and sexy and bold, and it pushes us, making us feel things we don’t expect, bending genres, taking unfamiliar turns down dark alleys, and all the while, we're confident that this movie knows exactly what it's up to.

Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut may be Stanley Kubrick’s most underrated movie. There are plenty of people who either love or hate The Shining, Barry Lyndon, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange. But Eyes Wide Shut has been damned with half-hearted praise. Critics pegged it as a good, not great, film, perhaps not wanting to overstate their case in the wake of Kubrick's death, just after he'd previewed the final cut. (Which he likely would have tinkered with even more, had he lived.) Eyes Wide Shut has always been overshadowed by the real-life things happening around it: Kubrick's passing, the film's supposedly lurid subject matter, the on-screen pairing of then husband-and-wife superstars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, playing a husband and wife with sexual problems. Surely all of this mire tainted people’s minds before they even saw the film. And what's more, Eyes Wide Shut is the kind of movie people talk about but never bother to see, having written it off as a dirty movie. But despite the movie's problems, which may be deeper than we think, it is a mesmerizing experience, one that held my interest for the whole two-and-a-half running time (a rare feat). 

The movie is set in New York at Christmastime, and it opens with Bill Harford, a prosperous Manhattan doctor, and his wife Alice, getting dressed for a party: the kind of fancy black tie event that offers a lot of schmoozing opportunities, the kind of thing Bill apparently loves (one of the perks of his profession, he assures Alice) but Alice dreads. Soon after they arrive, Alice adroitly downs a glass of champagne when Bill isn’t looking, and while he’s distracted by rich clients and hot models, she flirts with a Hungarian silver fox who wants to take her upstairs and ravish her. Alice even considers the prospect momentarily, letting it linger in the warm embrace of the champagne. We sense in that moment the tension inside Alice: she wants to be faithful to her husband even as he's annoying her and, even worse, flirting with other women. But then again, she's a woman with desires of her own, and those embers are still warm.

Kubrick channels James Joyce's lovely, pensive "The Dead", the story about a professor named Gabriel Conroy who is shocked to discover that his wife had a romance before him, one that she's never revealed. When Bill and Alice are talking in their bedroom, Alice reveals the contents of her dream—in which she's having multiple sexual partners—and Bill, although he himself has done plenty of flirting with other women—is undone. What's more, Alice had a temptation several years ago, one that she almost acted on. Of course it's understandably shocking to discover your wife has had desires for other men, but it's also ridiculous to think women are somehow incapable of having such desires, and even more ridiculous that men can excuse their own wrong-doing, but be completely undone by their wives'. Bill leaves the apartment ostensibly to make a house call, and eventually descends into a night of debauchery.

The great joke of Eyes Wide Shut is that Bill never actually does anything, even though his evening includes a visit to a prostitute (played by Vinessa Shaw) and later to a mansion on the outskirts of the city where some secret society of rich people has gathered for an elaborate orgy. They’re all adorned in black cloaks and Venetian masks to hide their true identities as they enact weird Pagan-esque rituals and then get down to business. Kubrick presents this prolonged scene as horrific, with throbbing, drawn out music and those costumes amping up a sense of yuppie grotesquerie, the sleazy feeling that rich people, people who run things, are enabled to do anything they want with impunity. 

Tom Cruise is marvelously cast as the designated watcher, much like the passive narrator of The Great Gatsby. Cruise’s good looks make people want to defile him—and he gives them plenty of opportunities—but he’s never willing to go all the way. This proves to be his salvation in Kubrick's puritanical world, because the prostitute he almost sleeps with is later diagnosed with HIV, and one of the girls at the witchy orgy overdoses, shrouding the entire proceedings in grisly darkness, and turning the film into a murder mystery, briefly.

It's the complexity of Bill's character that makes him so fascinating. He has a conscience, and he has temptations, and we get to watch those two impulses wage war against each other. Cruise, who so many have rebuked as a bad actor and nothing more than a pop Hollywood star, works for this movie. He's enough of a blank slate for us to project our own emotions onto him, but he also tries very hard to give Bill Harford depth, and I think his trying, which so rarely profits him, pays off here.

If Eyes Wide Shut makes any false moves, it's in the gradual de-emphasizing of Alice as a major character. For a good long while, they are equals, then it becomes Bill's movie, then, at the very end, the two are on the same level again. Nicole Kidman breathes real passion and pathos into Alice. When Kidman’s on screen, there’s nothing else you’d rather look at. Kubrick perhaps takes this too literally at times, letting the camera gaze on her nude body for no apparent reason other than the prospect of looking at Nicole Kidman. It's the most hypocritical thing about this movie, which really feels quite Victorian in its sexual politics.

But despite its flaws, Eyes Wide Shut is a show-stopping final note from Stanley Kubrick, and one that deserves a re-appraisal. With Sydney Pollack, Todd Field, Marie Richardson, Vinessa Shaw, and Alan Cumming. Written by Kubrick and Frederick Raphael, loosely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's short novel Traumnovelle.

Knight and Day

Knight and Day is somewhat of an updating of Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest in the sense that it offers us a fun adventure through a number of exotic or romantic locations around the world. Quickly leaving the U.S. behind for Austria, Spain, South America, even a tiny island in the middle of the ocean, this movie attempts to get in touch with the fun that Hollywood seems to have lost amidst the crusade for big, big, bigger pictures. And while Knight and Day has its share of explosions, we're always keenly aware that it's about two people.
The camera reminds us often enough with countless close-ups of stars Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise, who uses that unflattering image of himself jumping up and down on Oprah's couch to inject a frenetic, witty energy into his character. Come to think of it, Cruise may not be doing anything new, but given the bad press he's received over the last few years, it's good to see him doing something we're supposed to be laughing at. He plays the rogue CIA guy with whom Diaz--just an ordinary girl from Boston--becomes enveloped after a chance encounter at an airport. It turns out, the CIA is after Cruise because they think he's crazy and dangerous. He insists they're wrong. At least about the crazy part.
Diaz undergoes numerous blackouts due to Cruise drugging her periodically, which should be a red flag for a woman on any date with a guy who accuses the world of being out to get him. But in a movie, it's all done with good reason--for her own good, of course. Cameron Diaz has always been a very plucky heroine, and Knight and Day utilizes this to the hilt. There are moments when the movie soars above the sense of deja-vu that could have damned it as a dreadful bore, and a lot of that depends recklessly on the kinetic likability of the two leads. It's good to remember that the Hollywood media machine enjoys spitting its "has-been" celebrities out, but that doesn't mean we have to. And Cruise and Diaz prove that just because they're not new doesn't mean they can't show us a good time. They're professionals. ★★★