Eye of the Beholder
Year 2000 Trademarks:
- Numerous cheeky “I hate these new computers?!” jokes
- Frosted hair
- “Scene Selection” and “Interactive Menus” listed as Special Features on DVD box
What’s it like 10 years later?
I don’t recall how I first saw Eye of the Beholder, but I suspect it was rented by my mother sometime around late 2000, when it was a New Release at Captain Video in Vails Gate, NY. I suspect this because, after The Silence of the Lambs was released in 1991, my mother made it a point to watch every female-centric crime thriller Hollywood could churn out – and, luckily, churning out Lambs knockoffs was one of Hollywood’s favorite pastimes of the ’90s. She rented The Client. She rented Body of Evidence. She rented Point of No Return. She even rented Basic Instinct, which is every bit as disturbing to walk in on your mother watching as you think. She never saw these in theaters; they were kind of like her soap operas, to be enjoyed while talking on the phone or yelling down at me and my brothers wrestling in the furnished basement. While other women were watching The Rosie O’Donnell Show, my mom was watching Harry Connick, Jr. sexually assault Sigourney Weaver in the opening of Copycat.
No actress provided mom with more soft-R thrills than Ashley Judd, the undisputed queen of the ’90s thriller. In his review of Eye of the Beholder, A.O. Scott called Judd “the scowling embodiment of female vengeance,” and starting with 1997’s Kiss the Girls, she began a roughly 10-year post in that position. Every other Judd film, it seemed, had her pursuing a serial rapist or receiving phone calls from a killer. In addition to Kiss the Girls, there was Double Jeopardy, High Crimes, and Twisted.When Along Came A Spider was released in 2001, I refused to believe Ashley Judd was not in it. Hell, part of me still thinks the producers got the credits wrong.
Re-watching Eye of the Beholder in 2010, I was sure its status as another Ashely Judd thriller would be the most dated aspect of it. It was not. It turned out to be something much stranger. I suppose in a very broad way the movie has the traits of a typical thriller – an international spy (Ewan McGregor) pursues a sexy, mysterious killer (Judd) around the globe – but narratively speaking, Eye of the Beholder is more abstract than the previous year’s Being John Malkovich and Matrix combined. No two scenes of the film seem to have any relation to each other. (At one point in the movie, Ewan McGregor jumps from the bushes and beats the shit out of an old blind man for no apparent reason. At another, a passenger train impossibly fills with water, like an aquarium.) This isn’t a criticism. The strangeness appears to be completely deliberate on the part of the screenwriter (who, shockingly, was French), but it’s like a David Lynch movie disguised as The Bone Collector 2. I imagine 90 percent of the film’s audience – my mom included – were not looking for abstract mind-fuckery when they picked up a VHS box with Ashley Judd and guns on it.
In terms of genre, therefore, Eye of the Beholder is far to weird to really classify as “dated.” Luckily, none other than Jason Priestley makes a glorious third-act appearance that more than fulfills this duty. Beholder was Priestley’s first role after ending his defining 9-season run on Beverly Hills 90210 as terminal nice-guy Brandon Walsh, and his role in the movie is a clear attempt to escape Walsh typecasting through the darkest role he could find: a bleach-haired drug dealer who punches Ashley Judd in the face repeatedly before forcibly injecting her with heroin.
But here’s the funny thing: Priestley may have been playing an abusive junkie sleazebag with frosted tips, but in such a crazy, confusing film, his familiar, charming face provided some much-needed stability. He could not escape his nice-guy status. Even as Priestley cooked dope in a rusty spoon, I felt like Brandon had just shown up at an out-of-control party to drive a drunken Kelly home.
