Eye of the Beholder: the monitor and the monitored
Eye of the Beholder is a movie in which many secrets are kept. Most importantly, we never get a clear idea why the Eye's (Ewan McGregor) wife and kid might be estranged, and we never get a good handle on the clinical aspects of Joanna's sociopathic compulsions. And these are the two main characters, the ones we're supposed to understand. With most movies, lapses like this would be enough to bring them down. But most movies aren't like Eye of the Beholder, which is able to get way with such indiscretion simply because the fairy-tale structure is so complete and so powerful.
On the one hand, you have this Eye, for whom privacy is a laughing matter (if he ever laughed, or had reason to laugh). Like all good British agents, he has enough hi-tech surveillance equipment that he could pawn it and buy small island somewhere. Like all good private eye-types, too, he's in over his head with Joanna, has proven once again that private eyes in the movies are always a bargain: pay them a few hundred dollars, and--when they set up their stake-out--they'll invariably see much more than they were paid to see. The Eye does, and--this is telling--he doesn't blink. Instead he does the old assassin-in-the-movies shuffle, and falls for his 'target,' goes AWOL from his employer, then spends the rest of the movie protecting her from harm--the harm he used to stand for. It's a neat little dynamic.
On the other hand--talking fairy-tale structuring--there's Joanna, playing more or less a talented Ms. Ripley: time and again, she's surprised at the violence she's been psychologically programmed to carry out. But then too, she's cold enough to turn off the guilt, which means she's pretty much the perfect killer, which is to say she's the only 'target' really worth viewing by this Eye. His talent is wasted one everyone else, as is established early on. And that's the fairy-tale part, the Insider part: ideal characters coming together.
The pairing structure goes deeper, too, though. Not only are these two people destined to meet by dint of their respective abilities/lifestyles, but they're also both injured enough emotionally that no one else would do--they're made for each other. All the same, though, it's a long-distance, telescoped relationship, with the Eye playing guardian angel to Joanna by appealing again and again to his guardian angel (KD Lang, at British HQ; and yes, 'guardian' and 'Gordian' is perhaps an intentional homonym, here). No, you never do understand a lot of things, but at the same time everything that happens feels so inevitable that your unanswered questions don't matter so much as whether these two starcrossed lovebirds will ever get on screen together, in the closing frames, for however long. It's a romance; you get caught up in it. And yes, Eye of the Beholder is something of an art-film trying to go mainstream with starpower (per Magnolia, Being John Malkovich), but still, not everyone will appreciate the End of the World-ish (Wem Wenders) pacing, the psychological personifications, the long moments with soft music. Eye of the Beholder is an acquired taste, isn't simply Enemy of the State gone noir. It's something in it's own right, something much more powerful, a muted psychological thriller which attempts to pass the microscope over the human condition, and then linger for a while.
(c) 2000 Stephen Graham Jones, http://www.cinemuck.com
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