On July 16, 1999, the evening of the debut of Stanley Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut (based on Schnitzler's Traumnovelle), a critic on the “Charlie Rose Show” complained that Tom Cruise had played the physician Bill Harford with a disappointing lack of initiative. Such complaints echo the criticism against Georg von Wergenthin in Der Weg ins Freie by contemporaries of Schnitzler armed with theories of proper behavior for novel heroes. For anyone acquainted with Traumnovelle, however, the fact that Cruise/Harford is frequently dazzled by what happens to him is a sign he has faithfully rendered the role of a typical Schnitzler anti-hero scarcely a model physician or husband. Kubrick's painstaking deliberateness with Frederic Raphael's screen play ran against the grain of Hollywood's requisite chase scenes and blazing guns to provoke the same response felt by audiences a century earlier, when antiheroes such as Medardus (Der junge Medardus) crossed Schnitzler's stage with nuanced psychology instead of bold, resolute action. If Schnitzler could not count on having the reader of his own time understand his snapshots of the fickle soul, could Kubrick depend on a better viewer at the close of the century? Kubrick (1928–1999) died before he could see the reception of his vision in theaters across the United States.

The uncanny aspect of Traumnovelle had been its combination of dream and real world, and Schnitzler had bent the norms of the novella genre without breaking them.