Fear, desire, murder, madness, life on the road and the agony and ecstasy of peeping toms. These are the combustible ingredients for “Eye of the Beholder,” one of the weirder romantic thrillers in recent years — but not one of the most successful.
Why? “Beholder” tries to blend old film noir and new high-tech thriller styles with only sporadic impact — mostly because the moviemakers don’t trust their story enough.
Starring Ewan McGregor as a surveillance expert named The Eye and Ashley Judd as Joanna Eris, the serial killer with whom he falls in love, “Eye of the Beholder” is an ultimate example of the voyeuristic thriller and a good example of how trends and technology can overwhelm even the best ideas.
“Eye,” teasingly, is based on one of the great noir novels of the past two decades, Marc Behm’s lean, bare-bones shocker “The Eye of the Beholder.” But you’d never guess how good the book is from watching this movie. Where Behm’s 1980 novel is a genuine nightmare, the movie is so confused, over-done and over-designed, it’s hard to feel anything while you watch it. It’s been too modernized, too calculated: a superficial art-thriller that tries to take us deep inside its characters, but only winds up skimming their too-glamorous skins.
They should have given us more. Original author Behm was a screenwriter himself (he co-wrote “Charade” and the Beatles’ “Help!”), but “Beholder” was written and directed by Australian filmmaker Stephan Elliott (“The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert”), who gets too fancy for the story’s good. Elliott has created a sunless, surreal look that at first seems fitting for a saga of psychological disintegration and romantic obsession on the road. That sense of timelessness is meant to universalize this ale of a detective who falls in love with the killer he’s trailing — though, actually, it only makes things more confusing.
McGregor, the hip Scot of “Trainspotting” (plus the new “Star Wars”), plays The Eye, a reclusive snoop who spies on people with state-of-the-art cameras and bugs while avoiding personal contact. Assigned to tail a rich client’s reckless son, The Eye is photographing the son’s kinky tryst with mysterious Joanna when she stabs the son to death. Repelled but fascinated, he doesn’t turn her in, but instead keeps spying on her — from New York to San Francisco, the Southwest to Alaska. He ignores his assignment, dodges his company contact, Hilary (played by k.d. lang), and takes off on his own.
Gradually he discovers that Joanna is a serial killer, who repeatedly switches identities and seduces and slaughters men for their money. And, as he discovers more and more about Joanna’s secret criminal life, he becomes obsessed with her, digging into her past, falling deeper under her spell. As her victim list grows, his desire mounts.
A romance in which the couple almost never meets; a detective story in which the killer’s identity is known from the beginning; a drama in which a detective becomes a killer’s “guardian angel.” These are the key elements of “Beholder,” which should give you a hint of its sheer strangeness. Writer-director Elliott tries to reimagine Behm’s tale as a post-James Bond thriller, with The Eye himself changed from a middle-aged shamus (in the Phillip Marlowe-J.J. Gittes mold) to a sexy, shy electronic snoop.
Bringing in the heightened post-1980s technology is potentially a nice idea — though, truth to tell, I’m a little sick of movies that keep pointing their cameras at computer screens, other cameras and endless video images. But casting McGregor as The Eye is something else: a bad inspiration from which the whole movie ultimately never recovers.
In a way, poor McGregor is mugged and hamstrung by his own director. Where the book’s Eye pursued Joanna because he was a middle-aged guy who believed she might be his daughter, the movie’s Eye is clearly infatuated with her.
Where the book gives a devastating sense of time’s passage and The Eye’s and Joanna’s deterioration — after 30 years and more than 100 killings — the movie, which obviously has to compress, keeps inanely implying that this misbegotten couple might somehow get together.
Judd, fortunately, escapes these revisionist problems. As Joanna, she gives at least part of what could have been an extraordinary performance: a sociopath who engages our sympathies, a remorseless killer with a convincing hot-and-cold heart. The book’s Joanna is icy and scary: almost a female version of Patricia Highsmith’s (talented) Mr. Ripley. And though the motivations the movie’s script gives her are slight and unconvincing, Judd makes them work. An emotional chameleon, Judd is coming off another illogical thriller to which she gave some depth (the legally screw-loose “Double Jeopardy”), and she performs more magic here — but not enough to save the film.
“The Eye of the Beholder” has been filmed before — much more faithfully — by French director Claude Miller in 1983 as “Deadly Circuit,” with Isabelle Adjani as the killer and the much older Michel Serrault as The Eye. Elliott should have followed Miller’s example. This “Eye” would have been greatly improved if it had been written and cast for an aging co-star like Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino or Robert De Niro, rather than youth fave McGregor.
“Beholder,” like “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” is one of the best American crime novels and, sadly, both of them (“Ripley” not as damagingly) were hurt in translation. Though I realize moviegoers hate it when critics keep telling them the book was better, trust me this time. Behm’s “Eye” is better, tenser, scarier. More cinematic too.
”EYE OF THE BEHOLDER”
(star) (star) 1/2
Directed and written by Stephan Elliott; based on the novel “The Eye of the Beholder” by Marc Behm; photographed by Guy Dufaux; edited by Sue Blainey; production designed by Jean-Baptiste Tard; music by Marius De Vries; produced by Nicolas Clermont, Tony Smith. A Destination Films release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:49. MPAA rating: R (language, sensuality, nudity, violence).
THE CAST
The Eye ………………. Ewan McGregor
Joanna Eris …………… Ashley Judd
Alex Leonard ………….. Patrick Bergin
Hilary ……………….. k.d. lang
Dr. Brault ……………. Genevieve Bujold
Gary …………………. Jason Priestley
