Directed by David Yates. Written by Steve Tesich
Shared trauma can inspire romance. By that I don’t mean Stockholm syndrome, but the kind that develops once you’ve gone through something awful together. It doesn’t have to be anything exceptional, like escaping a sinking cruise liner – sometimes working the same dead-end job is enough.
David Yates, and by extension writer Steve Tesich, is banking on that theory to sell us Eyewitness, the story of a janitor who is a key witness in a murder case and uses that as leverage to get closer to a local reporter he’s crushing on.
William Hurt is Daryll, said janitor working in a big office building who one night stumbles over a businessman’s corpse. If that wasn’t bad enough, it’s the same businessman Darryll’s best buddy Aldo has a known grudge against since a confrontation between the two saw Aldo fired, so he’s immediately in a tough spot with authorities. He opts to lie and lay low.
For 10 minutes. Leaving the building, he spots Tony Sokolow (Sigourney Weaver) and immediately changes his mind. You see, every night Daryll races home after his shift to watch his recording of that night’s news where Tony’s one of the star journalists. He’s head over heels, so when Tony’s sent to cover the case, Daryll does feel like talking after all. It’s just the only thing that passes his lips when Tony’s got her microphone out is how in love he is with her, and how much he wants to take her out. To get the story, Tony humors him…
Dates are unlikely, however, as they’re both soon pursued by the dead businessman’s associates, Zionist zealots, and the two detectives trying to solve the case. It’s here, in the chaos of it all, Yates thinks romance is plausible, and worse yet, believable.
You can imagine this supposed romantic spark between them has tough odds, and sure enough, it’s a non-starter for any sane individual. Standards may have been different in 1981, but watching it now in the year of 2024, there’s no getting around Daryll is a creep. A stalker with no hold on reality, decency or decorum, he exhibits a relentless obsession with the idea of Tony, as evidenced by never asking her a question to get to know her as a person, and his insistence that his “love” is all that matters for them to be together should give you an idea of who he is. He’s what we’d call a nice guy, a person whose fantasy trumps the romantic object’s reality.
All of this is to say that Tony, even if she is a journalist at heart, she really ought to reach for her mace rather than her tape recorder, and throw this cold fish back into the ocean.
The romantic pairing is half the film, the murder mystery the other, so Eyewitness is gut-shot as a consequence, yet it soldiers on, bleeding all over the place as it tries to overcome this fatal wound. Eyewitness actually does provide plenty of thrills and suspense with some stunning sequences mixed in. In its bones, Eyewitness is a genuine murder mystery.
As the unlikely hero, there’s something to be said for William Hurt, particularly in the context of his catastrophic courtship. It’s hard to sell delusion, but Hurt’s commitment to Daryll’s nonsense is bulletproof, delivering monologues of lovestruck naivete with conviction and without a hint of self-ridicule. Within the stalker, there is a lonely boy that Hurt doesn’t neglect.
Together with the cocksure lawyer he plays in Body Heat, Hurt’s work in 1981 sees him corner the market on self-deluded lover boys. Where Body Heat’s Ned is an arrogant womanizer indentured to his dick, Daryll’s a lovesick introvert who falls head over heels as soon as he has the chance. Sensibilities and motivations aside, these two men represent exhibits 1A and 1B of bad romance and something has to be said for Hurt being able to believably portray both and show us the difference.
Sigourney Weaver is great as the object of Daryll’s affection, but the movie’s insistence that she not run away screaming from Daryll hollows out her character, since she suddenly makes no sense. Weaver does have the perfect level of backbone and vulnerability to deal with the shenanigans the murder mystery throws her way and still resemble a person throughout the ordeal.
David Yates follows a tried-and-true formula with Eyewitness, combining murder and conspiracy with a tender romance to create a thriller that intends to both get your heart racing and make it flutter. It succeeds at the former, but its romantic element is so icky it can only really be considered half a good movie, forever limited by the ceiling imposed by its damning “love” story.
Mikkel Frederiksen 