Eye Of The Beholder

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Rating: C-
Ewan McGregor is a man codenamed "Eye", who works for a government organization so secretive I can't tell you the name. High-tech surveillance is his game, such that his life consists of voyeuristically watching others on a TV monitor or while squinting through a telescopic lens. His devotion to his job, or more specifically his absence from home, made his wife and daughter pick up and leave one day and never come back. He's been alone ever since, complete in his isolation behind a wall of electronic equipment as he peers into other people's lives from an emotionally safe distance. McGregor serves as living proof that cell phones, video conferencing, and all the other modern technology which is supposed to allow people to communicate easier, actually has the opposite effect of decreasing true human to human interaction. But when one day's peeping assignment includes Ashley Judd in the viewfinder, an obsession takes hold of him, and he feels compelled to find out everything he can about her.

It's hard to make a film detailing the cold, emotional detachment of its characters without the audience feeling cold and emotionally detached from the film. Unfortunately, that's what happens with Eye of the Beholder. As we view shot after shot of McGregor interfacing with electronics instead of humans, we feel his isolation, but at the same time we begin to lose interest in the narrative. A major part of what drives any good film (besides car crashes) is the interaction between the characters, and a film about isolation will, by definition, be thin in this area. When McGregor and Judd finally do meet in person, the movie picks up, but by then it's almost too late.

Which is not to say that the filmmakers don't cause some of their own problems. In one scene, Judd bathes herself in a hot bath while McGregor listens through the wall and caresses the sheetrock. Ugh. It gets worse. In a scene guaranteed to have any real cop derisively rolling in the aisles, Judd is in her underwear when a detective bursts in and starts making insinuations about her nefarious activities (she's a compulsive murderer among other things). Judd asks what it will take to get him off her back, and his reply is a thousand dollars and a shot of cognac. And he means it. Fortunately for the gene pool, she decides to shoot him instead (he does, however, get the cognac). She flees the hotel room, and in rushes McGregor right over to the bathtub, from which he extracts a hair from the drain (DNA evidence, you see). The least the film could've done is let us hold on to the thin shred of hope that this might be hair from her head, but no, the film happily informs us it's definitely pubic hair.

The movie also gets heavyhanded with its symbolism. As McGregor travels from city to city, he collects crystal globe paperweights (those things with the water and snow stuff inside that you shake up and drop from your hand when you die). We get the point after the first two or three, but the film keeps showing us more and more and more. All the paperweights and the pointless process shots made me conclude that writer/director Stephan Elliot is either a Citizen Kane fan, or a first-time director. Another scene has a character telling Judd, "Sharks only have a memory of a minute or two. That's my kind of life. The downside is you have to keep moving to stay alive." At which point we're all supposed to gasp in astonishment at the ironic way he's just summed up Judd's whole life. I guess.

The scene near the end in McGregor's trailer may leave some viewers confused over why he did what he did. Without giving anything more away, all I can advise is to think back on the two distinctly different manners with which Judd has treated her suitors throughout the film. McGregor is trying to prove to himself which category he falls in.

References to voyeurism and especially to the bathtub scene will undoubtedly instill memories of Sliver into some readers' minds. Which is what Eye of the Beholder is, basically - Sliver without the masturbation.