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At First Sight

1999, Movie, PG-13, 128 mins

At First Sight: Review

AT FIRST SIGHT
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He's blind, she's a basket case, and they blunder their way through an affair beset by such outrageous fortune that it could only have been based on a true story: No self-respecting screenwriter would dare whip up a gimmick like making a blind man see just so to motivate sappy relationship problems. Virgil Adamson (Val Kilmer), who lost his sight as a small child and has made himself a happy and relatively self-sufficient life with the help of devoted older sister Jennie (Kelly McGillis), works as a masseur at a local spa. That's where he falls for high-strung New York architect Amy (Mira Sorvino), who smells like coffee cake. Amy, a take-charge type when she's not having unexplained crying jags, persuades Virgil to undergo sight-restoring surgery, but is shocked and confused when the overnight transition from some 25 years of total blindness to seeing proves a little hard on him. (Virgil also has a doctor who arranges to have a camera crew in the brightly lit room when the bandages first come off his eyes.) Inspired by a case history from the nimble pen of neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose gift for lending a human dimension to tales of bizarre medical misfortune has rewarded him with several stints on the best-seller list, this maudlin melodrama nevertheless rings profoundly false. Some of the fault lies with the filmmakers -- the story isn't gracefully told -- but more rests with the leads. Sorvino is as convincing an architect as Cindy Crawford was a lawyer (yes, we know Sorvino graduated Harvard magna cum laude): She giggles and pouts her way through the film, while Kilmer is filled with mannered, life-affirming joie de vivre before the surgery and looks deeply pained after. For all the tear-jerking plot twists, it's a glumly dry-eyed affair. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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