Hysterical Blindness (2002)

Uma Thurman, Juliette Lewis, Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara all give wonderful performances. Unfortunately, a great performance of a boring character is still uninteresting. When the movie is a largely plot-less character study, dull characters are fatal.Uma Thurman is particularly good as Debbie, a painfully neurotic, almost psychotic twenty-something girl. She's desperate for love, and stalks it in all the stupidest ways possible. She repeatedly throws herself at men, only to be disappointed. She's exactly the sort of barfly that you can find in every local bar. Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara give amazing performances as an older waitress and a retiree in a budding romance. Unfortunately, they're secondary characters, and don't get enough screen time to properly develop.

This movie can't quite decide what it wants to be: 1. A serious coming of age sort of profile of two direction-less young women who are trapped in working class neighborhood without any future ahead of them, looking for love in all the wrong places, who ultimately find some sort of enlightenment about love and themselves. OR 2. A lighthearted look at two girls in the 80s who just wanta have fun and/or Mr. Right but trip and fall a few times on their way towards that goal. Another problem is that the movie fails to significantly define its setting either in place or time. We figure out NJ from the accents and 80s from the clothes and snippets of music but these elements could have been played up more. You spend time trying to figure out what sort of direction the movie is taking and never get quite satisfied as it fails to produce in either direction. You do feel for the characters but the Uma Thurman is so over the top that you are repulsed by her character which is so heavy handed that it seems out of place with the rather sweet lightness of other characterizations in the movie - her mother, her friend, her friend's daughter etc.

Movies have made us believe or want to make us believe that "special people" or "special events" are what is worth showing or telling while in reality, we all, the non-heroes, the gray people of the world, live our day-to-day life and deal with our day-to-day problems and the way to cope with that reality is what this film is all about.Uma Thurman and Gena Rowlands are both great by depicting normal people. Not super heroes.So is no-questions-asked friend Juliette Lewis. Pity that both men, Justin Chambers and Ben Gazzara look so superficial and hollow.The greatness of the film is, again, translating a day-to-day situation, we can all pass, into a flawless flow of events which are a lot easier for the viewer to recognize as flaws that to the people in the screen. I just wish we could see ourselves as we can see the actors.

This adaptation of an off broadway play, about two friends living in New Jersey and looking for love in all the wrong places, features great acting by Juliet Lewis, Geena Rowlands, and Uma Thurman. Thurman, especially, is great and, alone, worth the price of admission (or rental). This is nother coup for HBO in producing meaningful indie films.