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AT FIRST SIGHT Send This Review to a Friend
Trust Hollywood to take a good subject and screw it up. For a while there's promise that "At First Sight," based on a case history by Dr. Oliver Sacks, will turn out to be a potential winner, but before long the screenplay by Steve Levitt, as directed by Irwin Winkler, takes the hokey turns that pretty much ruins things.
Val Kilmer plays Virgil, blind since childhood, now working as a masseur at a Bear Mountain, New York resort. Mira Sorvino is Amy, a Manhattan architect who needs to get away, and when she's on the resort massage table, Virgil's hands embark upon such a sensuous journey that she's immediately smitten without actually seeing him and without knowing he is blind. They quickly become soul mates, but Amy also opts for her own hands-on relationship.
She insensitively presses Virgil to try a new surgical technique to restore his sight. It works, only to cause trouble. Now he sees, but his brain can't deal with the sudden, shocking imagery. If the writer and director had trusted the source material more, we might have had a superior film. But the reactions and counter-reactions are excessive. Amy's relationship with her ex-husband, also a business partner, clutters the scene, as does a side plot involving Virgil's long-absent father.
Soon all is wrapped in drama as sticky as the cotton candy that's an elusive childhood memory haunting Virgil. Despite Sorvino's great screen charm and acting know-how and Kilmer's sincere portrayal, the story becomes soap opera. Add Nathan Lane for shtick as a therapist. You won't believe some of the lines, such as Amy asking Virgil if he ever thought of what it might be like to see. How blind can a screenwriter be? An MGM release
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