THE EYE

Lionsgate/ Paramount Vantage
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: B
Directed by: David Moreau, Xavier Palud
Written By: Sebastian Gutierrez, Source material from Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui, Oxide Pang, Danny Pang
Cast: Jessica Alba, Alessandro Nivola, Parker Posey, Obba Babatunde, Rade Serbedzija, Fernanda Romero, Rachel Ticotin
Screened at: Dolby88, NYC, 2/1/08
Opens: February 1, 2008

They say you can’t judge a man until you walk a mile in his shoes. According to directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud, you can’t judge a woman until you know with whose eyes she’s seeing. Working with a script by Sebastian Gutierrez based on source material from Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui, Oxide Pang and Danny Pang’s year 2002 Cantonese language hit from Hong Kong “The Eye” (“Gin gwai”), Moreau and Palud take off from the realistic premise that 30,000 corneal transplant operations are performed each year in the United States. What’s is like for a person who has been blind for so long that she no longer remembers what it was like to have vision? Well, surprise, surprise. It’s not always so pleasant. Such a person may well have an identity crisis; having done things one way for twenty years, then suddenly needing to change. No longer walking with a slim, conspicuous white and red cane, she has to put up with people who expect her to get out of their way quickly on the street, to move from running traffic, and the like. Similarly, in the superb documentary movie from eight years ago “Sound and Fury,” director John Aronson asks, If you could make your deaf children hear, would you do it? Another surprise. Many parents, fearing a loss of identity, did refuse to give their children cochlear implants that would have enabled them to hear for the first time, stating that their identification with the community of the deaf was sacrosanct. Go figure.

The identity crisis undergone by Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba), a prominent concert violinist with a symphony orchestra in Los Angeles, is all that multiplied by ten, so much so that the attractive brunette must have begun to think that King Oedipus had the right idea. Blind from early childhood when she and her sister, Helen Wells (Parker Posey), played with firecrackers, she reads Braille and rises to the position of concert soloist, enjoying the comforts of a luxury high-rise in the city. After a successful corneal transplant administered by Dr. Haskins (Obba Babatunde), she opens her eyes slowly, the audience feeling the tension of the historic moment as her guilt-ridden sister looks on. Not too concerned when her vision is blurry at first, she acts increasingly deranged when sinister shadows appear; a ghostly figure moans, “I’m freezing;” “I’m hungry;” complains another, while an anxiety-ridden kid in the hallway worries what will happen to him when his father sees his report card. There’s a lot more to come.

What’s a scary movie without a hint of romance? Enter Dr. Paul Faulkner (Alessandro Nivola), who sports a fashionable three-day beard, though at age thirty-six he seems too young to put on his glasses, then place them on top of his head, and put them on again. This doctor, who specializes in rehabilitating patients like Sydney by accustoming them to their new identities, shows her around town, ultimately taking her for a fifteen-hour drive to Mexico to find the donor of the eyes. (Unfortunately the donor’s family did not live in Cancun.)

“The Eye” is filmed by Jeffrey Jur in Vancouver to stand in for L.A. with a relatively brief segment in New Mexico, the latter credibly replacing some rural topography of our good neighbors south of the border. Much of the movie is derivative: some quite a bit so, since the script closely follows the trajectory of the Hong Kong twins Danny and Oxide Pang’s thriller from six years back, with vibrations from M. Night Shyamalan’s “Sixth Sense.” In the latter case, Sydney one-ups Cole Sear: she sees not only dead people but people about to die. As her skills with the violin being to deteriorate (press notes say that if you do not practice for two days, it takes months to recover your virtuosity), her new talent is born: she can warn people stalked by shadowy Mr. Death.

The movie is more than watchable. Notwithstanding our experience with pictures of this nature, we are still supplied with a number of scenes that may not jolt us from our seats, but at least nudge us a few inches forward. (I had to look away when it appeared that Sydney was about to twist out her eye.) For those who like Jessica Alba, she’s in just about every millimeter of film stock.

There are the usual unbelievable happenings aside from the ghosts. Examples: Her building has a 13th floor. The doctor not only risks his license by divulging the name of the donor, but is willing and able to schedule a week away from his practice to drive his patient out of the country and back. (What would Michael Moore say about that?) Parker Posey looks normal. The music (supplied by Marco Beltrami) falls short of deafening thereby allowing those of us blockbuster fans who still retain our eardrums to keep our identities. A Mexican woman working in a ceramics sweatshop out in Nowhere, Mexico, speaks fluent English. A Mexican working-class woman happily donates her corneas presumably without monetary compensation to a well-to-do gringa. All in all, enough creepiness, even a plug by a celebrated 27-year-old actress for symphonic music, to justify your attendance.

Rated PG-13. 97 minutes. © 2008 by Harvey Karten Member: NY F