EYE OF THE BEHOLDER (director/writer: Stephan Elliott; screenwriter: Marc Behm (novel); cinematographer: Guy Dufaux; editor: Sue Blainey; cast: Ewan McGregor (Eye), Ashley Judd (Joanna Eris), Ann-Marie Brown (Lucy), Patrick Bergin (Alex), K.D. Lang (Hilary), Jason Priestley (Gary), Genevieve Bujold (Dr. Brault); Runtime: 101; Destination Films; 1999)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A beautiful piece of junk, amounting to a spectacle for the eyes only, as the film itself couldn't justify the violence and human depravity shown. This surreal thriller amounts to a beautifully photographed and stylish film. It is seen mostly as a travelogue of American cities, involving a beautiful serial killer of men Joanna (Ashley Judd) and a mentally unbalanced Washington-based British secret service surveillance agent known as Eye (Ewan McGregor), who follows her to various locations around the country and catches her on computer video taking off her clothes and as a murderer, but loses track of reality and begins to think that she's connected to the daughter that he hasn't seen for years, as he has been mentally unbalanced ever since his wife left him and took his daughter with her about seven years ago. There is no rational payoff to explain what is happening except this is some pretty sick stuff we are seeing. The only meeting the two have, is at the film's end, in an Alaskan diner.
It's a vile film, that tries to take the film down the same road as Coppola's "The Conversation" and where a number of other morally blurred films about voyeurism had gone, aiming mostly, perhaps, along the lines of Brian De Palma's suspenseful works. It works into its story devices from a multitude of other films, except this one just didn't add up and seemed to dwell on the grisly violence the woman psychopathic killer commits and offered no valid critical reason to justify all the gore in this beautiful looking but pointless film. It is based on the noir novel by Marc Behm and directed and written with flair by Australian Stephan Elliott (The Adventures of Priscilla/ Queen of the Desert).
Eye is assigned to spy on the son of a British government official. We see him by his laptop as he watches the room the man and woman are in, which conveniently has the shades up. She repeatedly stabs the blindfolded male victim while they are involved in some kinky sex while Eye watches it on the computer screen -- acting surpised and aghast at what he sees, but nevertheless he falls in love with her. He doesn't have her arrested because he's as nutty as a fruit cake himself, having visions and imaginary conversations with his missing daughter which he transfers onto the serial killer. So, he decides to tail her and track down her identity, and do everything he can to protect her so that he doesn't lose her like he lost his daughter.
With this insanity in mind, it becomes cold to watch these unappealing characters go through a number of other killings and with him becoming a cross-country voyeur. The other murders take place as she changes aliases and wigs at each murder stop, taking time to spout her interest in astrology and numerology. One of the murders takes place off camera, of a man drowned by her in a railroad car bathtub. The pregnant woman then goes to San Francisco and is about to marry a wealthy blind winemaker (Patrick Bergin) she just met, but this time the jealous Eye doesn't wait for her to murder, he does it himself by firing at his auto with a high-powered telescopic rifle from a bell tower, which causes a fatal traffic accident.
Genevieve Bujold shows up as a liberal-minded but misguided reform school psychologist from Boston, who treated Joanna in an experimental program and taught her to never reveal herself to any man. To always wear a wig, and how it is only the fittest who always survive. She brings up a link to the psychological problems of the agent and the serial killer, as both had fathers who abandoned them as children.
Folksinger k.d. lang flatly plays a sympathetic agent in Eye's workplace who always appears on a laptop screen. Her role consists of telling Eye that she can get fired if she runs the computer check that he wants her to run, which she does anyway after grousing about it. Since nothing in this film made sense, why should one expect her role to!
Jason Priestley plays a bleach-haired crack using drifter in Death Valley, who viciously beats Joanna before she is rescued by the ever watchful Eye.
After sight-seeing tours including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, the two simpaticos find themselves together in the perfect place for them, the Arctic cold of Alaska, and what could you say, the film has gotten so far off the beam, that it is not possible to wind it up and make sense out of it at this point. So the film ends as clumsily and distantly as it was throughout. As all we get from this film are some cheap exploitive thrills and a tease that there is some intellectual message hidden in all the mental gymnastics, but what we really have, is a film that failed to get untracked.
REVIEWED ON 1/7/2001 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews