The only significant character addition is Pollack's amoralist Victor. But if you find a copy, you may be startled to see how closely "Eyes Wide Shut" follows Schnitzler's original story. "Dream Story," written by one of Freud's favorite writers, is not a well-known novel. (In the notorious orgy sequence, we see only snippets of sex, obscured by the now-famous computer-generated kibitzers added to avoid an NC-17 rating.) Like "Lolita," the film flirts with sexual taboos before making its anti-hero (and us) pay the piper. Like "Clockwork Orange," "Eyes Wide Shut" begins by indulging audience appetites (for sex, rather than ultra-violence) before suddenly turning tables and plunging into cold sweat. The comedy bubbles up anyway, largely at the expense of sexual hypocrisy. Perhaps this is due to Kubrick's witty co-scenarist, Frederic Raphael ("Darling," "Two for the Road"), despite the fact that Raphael says that his boss forbade him to insert any jokes. "Eyes Wide Shut" has something else that has seemed almost missing from Kubrick's work since "A Clockwork Orange": that old sharp and mordant sense of humor.
Bill wheedles the party password ("Fidelio") and location out of Nick, wakes up a surly costume shop owner (Rade Sherbedgia) to get a cavalier's outfit and shows up at the mansion, where the orgy is in full swing - and where he tumbles into a paranoid trap involving kidnapping, intimidation and perhaps even murder. Loose-lipped Nick unwisely confides that he is bound for another, ultra-secret engagement at a private orgy - a party so exclusive, lewd and mysterious that all its revelers will be masked. Troubled by his wife's confession and called away, Bill leaves their Central Park West apartment and wanders down toward Greenwich Village, where he has a series of increasingly disturbing or arousing encounters before re-meeting an old med school classmate turned cocktail pianist, Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), who was also at the Ziegler party. And, later that night, back home, the slightly soused and stoned Alice confesses an earlier sexual fantasy and near-infidelity. As tipsy Alice disentangles herself from an amorous Hungarian (Sky Dumont) downstairs, Bill plays doctor upstairs. Attending a party hosted by one of Bill's friends, unctuous Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), the couple are separately propositioned by other guests - before Bill is called upstairs by Victor for a crisis: a hooker has overdosed on a heroin-cocaine speedball in Victor's bedroom.
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