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I am in the wrong business. Rather than waste a disgracefully large portion of my finite allotment of living time sitting through an endless parade of mostly mediocre-and-worse movies in hope of experiencing the occasional cinematic epiphany, I should put that patience to work spying on women. If this film is any indication, not only does the British government pay one handsomely to stare for months at Ashley Judd, but one gets to put one's hands on all kinds of hi-tek toys (and maybe the other way around, if one is really lucky), and enjoy a very liberal expense account to boot. Carpe per diem, I always say.
Ewan McGregor plays Stephen Wilson, codename "Eye," an investigator for the British consulate in Washington. His job, which he enjoys entirely too much to be healthful, is uncovering and tidying up after indiscretions committed by his country's visiting diplomats and their families. While observing one randy young git, he witnesses from a distance the chap's bloody demise at the hands of his shapely consort (Judd). But before he can hit 007 on speed dial, he becomes intrigued by not only her beauty, but her brief timeout for remorseful schizoid babblings (something about "Daddy" and "Christmas") before she efficiently disposes of the evidence, corpse and all. Well, most of the evidence, because Eye is like God's own private detective, and even though she's burned off her fingerprints with acid and disguises herself with a bigger wig collection than Cher's, he's on the trail.
Accompanied by very persistent, jealous psychic visitations from the daughter he hasn't seen since her abduction by his estranged wife several years earlier, Eye tracks the killer --whose name, after much computer photo-file searching and bathtub DNA scrounging, turns out to be Joanne -- from one city to the next, a trail of corpses in her anonymous wake. He's got major obs-comp issues, though, and winds up quitting his job to follow Joanne repeatedly back and forth across the country (they must have let him keep his frequent-flyer miles), all because "if I blink, I might lose her." But once he learns the sympathetic history to her Uberfraulein behavior, he turns into some kind of surrogate father, more interested in helping than stopping, or even meeting, her. Meanwhile the bodies continue to pile up, some accidentally, while he remains a superhuman shadow, popping up to help her escape (once, from a syringe-throwing Jason Priestley) then disappearing again. Before you know it a year has passed, it's Christmas again, and things come to a head, or at least to a stop, in Alaska at the Cafe At The End Of The World (wasn't that a Douglas Adams novel? no, wait, that was The Restaurant at the End of the Universe).
Adapted by Australian writer/director Stephan Elliot (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) from a French novel (it was previously filmed back in 1983), Eye of the Beholder is nothing if not stylish. Carefully framed images of bells, alleys, and snowglobes are supposed to foster our sympathy, but a sometimes brutal plot full of jarring turns fails to either satisfy or challenge. Storyline and emotions run all over the map, literally and figuratively, the substance woefully never catching up to the look. It's not that the thoroughly non-traditional relationship between main characters couldn't be interesting; this movie just never makes it work. The way McGregor sweats and grimaces through his role, with no clues besides the obvious why Eye has joined Joanne in the deep end, he could still be Renton from Trainspotting, having cleaned up and traded his heroin addiction for a hardware habit. In fact, Renton as P.I. would have been a lot better; at least he had a sense of humor. Eye is just creepy.
I will say this -- a lot of awfully unexpected stuff happens. But you could say the same thing if you hung out at the downtown Huddle House for a year, and I wouldn't much want to do that, either. C-
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