# Eye of the Beholder (1999)

### reviewed by
James Sanford

If you took five different jigsaw puzzles, threw the pieces together on a table top and spent two hours trying to make a cohesive picture out of the various bits, you might end up with something along the lines of "Eye of the Beholder." Made in 1998, this maddening mess features a pre-"Double Jeopardy" Ashley Judd and a pre-"Phantom Menace" Ewan McGregor alongside a peroxide-dipped Jason Priestley, an unflatteringly photographed Genevieve Bujold and, for reasons known only to her agent and God, songstress k.d. lang. All concerned have seen better days -- and been in much better movies -- than this one.

McGregor plays Stephen Wilson, a.k.a. "The Eye," a surveillance expert who bolts from his job at the British Consulate to follow mystery woman Joanna Eris (Judd) all over North America. Ostensibly a wig-maker (and she does seem to have enough fake hairpieces at hand to shame even Cher), Joanna is also deeply disturbed and has a habit of slaying every man who tries to get close to her. For most guys, this would not be a turn-on, but Stephen is prodded into pursuing Joanna by visions of his long-lost daughter, who tells him Joanna is really "just a little girl."

A little girl who likes to blindfold her lovers shortly before she stabs them to death perhaps, but a little girl nevertheless. Aside from having been abandoned by her own daddy one memorably miserable Christmas night, Joanna also received counseling from a probation officer (Bujold) who may or may not have helped to make her what she is today.

In its first half-hour, "Eye" is baffling but weirdly absorbing as well. The rest of the film, however, is just plain weird, jumping from Pittsburgh to San Francisco to Chicago to "The Cafe at the End of the World," a flapjack shack located somewhere on the Alaskan tundra where Joanna becomes the world's most unlikely waitress and Stephen her most devoted customer.

How Stephen and Joanna have the money for all this traveling and where Joanna comes up with all the disposable disguises she sports are questions left unanswered. This is not a story in which logic ever intrudes on the action. As in a dream, things seem to happen simply because the characters want them to happen. Or perhaps, given Joanna's obsession with astrology, because it was written in the stars.

Director Stephan Elliott labors long and hard to make this nonsense look as slick as possible and manages to come up with a handful of effective scenes, such as a split-screen image of Joanna in a bubble bath and Stephen looking longingly at the wall that separates him from her. But after nearly two hours of portentous close-ups of French cigarettes and glasses of cognac, voyeurism, ghosts, sight-seeing and chases, Elliott untidily wraps everything up with an extremely abrupt finale, leaving "Eye" just like that mass of scattered jigsaw puzzle pieces: Sure, there might possibly be a picture there, but who wants to waste their time trying to put it all together? James Sanford

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