Stephan Elliott, the director of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, has returned with a film equally quirky called Eye of the Beholder. But at least with Priscilla, there was some camp value that made it a cult classic. Eye of the Beholder is just plain odd and it does everything it can to confuse, and thus turn off, the audience.
It’s awfully hard to turn audiences on to a movie that essentially is about stalking, but this film tries. When the story begins, Ewan McGregor is a simple private eye,
following Ashley Judd around because she’s involved with his employer’s son in an embezzlement scheme. But after she kills the man, Ewan continues to watch her every move, stalking her as she wanders around the country and eventually falling for her.
Why does he fall in love with her? Well, because she’s Ashley Judd, of course, and I guess looks are all that matter. It certainly can’t be due to her personality, which is a
disjointed mess. In the beginning of the film she is a femme fatale, luring men into her trap and then killing them in cold blood without the slightest hint of a motive. But by the end
she has become needy and weak, an empty person. And this change is not signaled in any way by events of the film. There is no reason behind it. It just happens.
It’s no wonder that the characterization is so uneven, however, when the plot is such an incoherent jumble. Not even the faintest hint is given about why Judd is killing these men, or why McGregor becomes obsessed with her. Both of the characters have the tragic loss of family members in their past, so that could have been an explanation had these plot points been fully fleshed out. But they weren’t. They were barely touched upon, leaving the audience to guess at the motivations behind McGregor and Judd’s actions.
For example, McGregor’s wife left him about five years ago for reasons unknown, taking with her their daughter Lucy. McGregor is thus haunted by the “ghost” of his child, or what he imagines his child might look like, for part of the film. But when McGregor’s
fixation with Judd goes into full swing, this idea is abandoned and the young girl disappears completely.
And Judd’s father left her in an alley on Christmas Eve to wind up in a home for girls, run by a domineering woman who taught her to use her wiles to take control of men. Is her father’s betrayal the real reason she kills? Is the Christmas story even true, or is it just another lie to set up a false identity, along with the aliases and different colored wigs she uses? Was she taught to kill by her guardian, in order to let her survive on her own in
the real world? Do we care?
Much more time is spent on McGregor’s chase itself, him pursuing her from city to city throughout the country, watching her kill over and over. He is surprised every time she kills. And he still falls in love with her. Why? And when Judd finally settles down with a rich, blind man, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for her to strike. But she never does, and finally McGregor himself causes the blind man’s death to set the hunt back on
course. Again I have to ask why. But the film does not provide an answer.
I suspect that the muddled nature of the film was intentional, an attempt at setting a mood of confusion and disorientation, since most of the camera work is similarly chaotic. We see most of the events of the film as Ewan McGregor’s character sees them: from a distance or off of a blurry computer screen patched into hidden cameras. We can’t always see or hear exactly what is going on, and again maybe that was the intent. But it only serves to alienate the viewer further.
And still further confusion erupts from attempts to find meaning in some of the recurring images of the film. Statues of angels are interspersed frequently with rundown urban sprawls, torn and tattered American flags hanging from the building. Judd’s
character is also a heavy believer (at least, for parts of the film) in astrology and numerology, so images associated with these new age practices crop up repeatedly. If there is meaning behind these images, I could not divine them myself.
When the ending finally did come, I felt like I had spent an eternity in the theater, even though the film had not yet reached the two-hour mark. The conclusion is as unruly and incomprehensible as the rest of the film, leaving you guessing at what has occurred. It seems to end in the middle of the action without any clear resolution given for what the story meant. My advice would be to save yourself the time and trouble it takes to try to figure Eye of the Beholder out. Stay as far away from this film as you possibly can.
