Eyes Wide Shut: Music from the Motion Picture
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| Artist(s) | Jocelyn Pook |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Music from the Motion Picture |
| Label | Reprise / Wea |
| Honors | |
| …Judged against that history, Kubrick’s final soundtrack, Eyes Wide Shut, may well be his most subtle and consistently surprising. Typically disparate, yet utterly evocative of the film’s complexity of mood and psychosexual undercurrent, it initially glides effortlessly from old Kubrick favorite Ligeti… | |
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The late director Stanley Kubrick’s masterful pairing of image, song, and symphony has forever imbued an impossibly eclectic body of music with indelible psychic connotations that range from cosmic grandeur (2001’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and “The Blue Danube”) to cynical irony (A Clockwork Orange’s use of Beethoven, Rossini, and Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain”; Vera Lynn’s warbling “We’ll Meet Again” over Dr. Strangelove’s climactic vision of apocalypse) and outright left-field loopiness (the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” from Full Metal Jacket); he may not have written a note of it, but it would somehow always be his. Judged against that history, Kubrick’s final soundtrack, Eyes Wide Shut, may well be his most subtle and consistently surprising. Typically disparate, yet utterly evocative of the film’s complexity of mood and psychosexual undercurrent, it initially glides effortlessly from old Kubrick favorite Ligeti (an excerpt and reprise of “Musica Ricercata II” rendered as a stark, minimalist dirge by pianist Dominic Harlan), through a Shostakovich waltz and Chris Isaak’s edgy “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing” to the schmaltzy ballroom sop of “When I Fall in Love.” Crucially, Kubrick also commissioned original music (a rarity in his work since Strangelove) by English composer Jocelyn Pook, and her handful of compelling tracks range from Elgar-autumnal to hauntingly avant-garde, all of it becoming a piece of the director’s strange, satisfying stew of classical, rock, jazz, and ostensibly banal pop. A soundtrack that evokes Kubrick’s very essence: complex, satisfying, yet wholly enigmatic. —Jerry McCulley
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