Sliver

Based on Ira Levin's novel of the same name and adapted by Joe Eszterhas who is best known for Basic Instinct and Showgirls, Sliver is typical enough of 1990s multiplex  fare - a meretricious affair that is all surface and no substance

Sharon Stone plays Carly Norris, a divorced book editor who moves into an upmarket Manhattan apartment building. In quick succession she becomes the object of desire for Jack Landsford (Tom Berenger),  a successful Ira Levinish author, and Zeke Hawkins (William Baldwin), a video game designer. In order to win Carly both men insinuate that the other is involved in the supposed suicide of a girl who formerly lived in Carly’s apartment. Then her neighbour Vida (Polly Walker) is murdered. It looks like Jack did it but maybe it was Zeke. Then again, maybe it really was Jack.

Sliver wants to be a film about voyeurism which, of course, as material for a movie is ripe with possibilities. The trouble with this film is that it not so much about the psychological tendency as a pastiche of familiar signs of it.  Everything about the production design, Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography and  Noyce’s direction conspires to suggest some perverse compulsion at work but no-one is real enough to actually embody the condition in any credible way.

Fundamentally one would have to say that the problem lies with Esztrehas’s formulaic and semi-sleazy script which simply slaps together (and apparently disembowels the novel) any number of conveniences, including a hidden $6 million surveillance system that allows Zeke to monitor an entire apartment building, as it moves its puppet characters around at will in order to keep us tantalized by the racy sex-and-violence combination.

Stone, who made such a name for herself a year earlier in Basic Instinct once again obliges in the underwear department but her character remains borderline affectless throughout this sadly perfunctory film.

 

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