AT FIRST SIGHT Review by Victory A. Marasigan http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~vmaras1/reviewsidx.html
Traveling architect Amy (Mira Sorvino) meets hunky, sexy-voiced masseur Virgil (Val Kilmer). Said masseur turns out to be blind. Amy falls for Virgil, and within what seems like a week of their first meeting, she suggests he have his blindness "corrected" with an innovative surgery in New York City. Is this love?
At First Sight is just the sort film Hollywood thinks it can pull off and not seem condescending. What filmmakers more often than not fail to realize is that it is virtually impossible to succinctly capture the full scope of the life of a blind person. You can have an actor stand there and flail his arms around, but that doesn't make him blind.
All of the lessons on vision that are espoused in the film are overshadowed by syrupy melodrama and on-subtle preaching. Among the more unnerving aspects of the film is the fact that Sorvino's supposedly protagonistic my more often comes off as disruptive to Virgil's life than helpful. For most of the movie, she's more blind than he is. Even after the tacked on happy ending, we feel that Virgil would have probably fared better learning on his own rather than escaping away with his fawning client.
Besides Amy, many other secondary characters act with unbelievable insensitivity towards Virgil's unique situation, including the doctor (Bruce Davison) who helps restore his sight (Come on, what idiot doctor lets a camera crew shine its lights in the face of a man whose never seen before!). These ironies in characterization are, of course, the intent of screenwriter Steve Levitt, but does he have to force it down our throats?
Granted, the film may prove enlightening for some, if more for the discussions on sense and perception it will provoke than for what actually transpires on screen. How do blind people manage to live their lives? Should we feel sorry for them or not? At First Sight works best when it addresses ideas of the infinite suddenly becoming finite, of the undefinable being defined. If there is a lesson to be taken away from it, it is that we shouldn't feel sorry for the blind, because what they lack in sense is made up for by a truly unique experience. And that can be much better than what we really see.
GRADE: C+
Reviewed January 27, 1999 at Loews White Marsh Theater, White Marsh, MD.
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