Fresh from minting a billion with The Avengers, Joss Whedon's blockbuster rehab continues. First came his fleet-footed adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, shot in 12 days in Whedon's home in Santa Monica and proving the play's place as a precursor to screwball. Now, via release on Vimeo, we have In Your Eyes, a Whedon script directed by Brin Hill and starring Zoe Kazan and Michael Stahl-David as two strangers who share an inexplicable telepathic bond. Think of it as a rom-com version of The Shining, or Nicholas Sparks on a macro-budget.
Kazan plays Rebecca, a pixiesh twentysomething with a teardrop-shaped face, big blue eyes and terrific taste in playful girly-girl dresses, who is married to a cold fish New Hampshire doctor (Mark Feuerstein). Hailing from the Patrick Bergin school of Matrimonial Hell, he likes to dine in silence, critique her dress sense with a curt "Is that what you're wearing?" and disapproves of the expression her face makes she pulls when she has one of her "seizures": in fact sudden bursts of psychic connectivity to Dylan (Stahl-David), an ex-con with stubble living in a trailer home in the New Mexico desert. They've had the connection since a childhood sledding accident, but suddenly the link has gone live. They can see what the other sees – "this ain't your head lady, this is New Mexico" – although for some reason they have to speak out loud to hear each other. Every time someone catches her seemingly talking to herself, Rebecca must dive for her phone as cover.
The film makes most sense, in fact, as an update on the old Nora Ephron idea in Sleepless in Seattle – a couple perfect for each other save that they have never met – in the age of the smartphone. The near-constant banter Rebecca and Dylan keep up will make perfect sense to a generation weaned on the 24-hour connectivity of texting, sexting and so on. This subtext may be too close to the surface. The supernatural back-shadow soon evaporates; for large sections you could be watching a film about a couple who have just bought a new phone and are super-excited to be using it. Rebecca plays Cyrano and coaches Dylan through the lead-up to a date ("Tell her you like her shoes!") but cuts out discreetly for the date itself; and when she has sex with her husband, Dylan only gets a taste of the aftermath: "Do you have a fever?"
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Why not go the distance and have full radio contact during sex? Then you might have had a comic set-piece to blow a few fuses. You could also have livened up their own sexual encounter – long-distance, of course, with lots of cross-cutting as they touch themselves, in lieu of one another, to a turgid alt-country soundtrack – with a little inside-track knowledge. But then that's the movie: too tame by half, the writing only one remove from the soft form and round edges of TV where Whedon cut his teeth. Here, everything has been puréed so there's nothing to chew on. Dylan gets a tough-love parole officer (Steve Harris) and a gang of ex-cons hoping to drag him back into one last job, but his criminality peels away like a fake tattoo: listening to Rebecca's heartbreaks, dreams and innermost wishes, he is a perfect listener, a dreamboat empath with a bottle of beer in his hand for added realism.
Why not make him a dick? One of the things that raised Tootsie above the level of cross-dressing farce was that of all the men who needed to see through a woman's eyes, Dustin Hoffman's chauvinist-wolf-in-new-man's clothing was more in need of it than most. There's nothing here for the conceit to bounce off, no way of distinguishing between these character's insides and their soft-focus outsides. Whedon's idea of getting behind into someone's eyes and into their head involves no shocks, no revelations, no new information. How can that be?
