I feel a little guilty giving a negative review to someone’s personal film at a film festival. Even if I don’t like it, they worked really hard on it and it’s a big deal to make it as far as a major festival like Tribeca. However, my main problems with In Your Eyes are with the screenplay, and this screenwriter has had decades of experience and quite a bit of success, so I don’t feel I need to pull any punches. Considering In Your Eyes is on the mild end of the metaphysical fantasy spectrum, I’m surprised it plays so awkwardly in the hands of Joss Whedon. Indeed, I think director Brin Hill and the cast do all they can with a story that’s a real reach for a basically simple premise.
Dylan (Michael Stahl David) and Rebecca (Zoe Kazan) share a connection. They can see what the other sees, feel what they feel and speak to each other. This strikes others as odd when Rebecca falls down from a seemingly unseen bar brawl or flees from an unseen fire. Mostly, Rebecca and Dylan never seem to save their conversations for private, so they always look like they’re talking to themselves.
As a pseudo-All of Me story, In Your Eyes doesn’t do much with the premise. As a metaphor for characters who are disengaged from their own lives, it’s really weak. Real world metaphors through fantasy are Joss Whedon’s thing. You lose your virginity and your boyfriend turns into a monster. You suffer depression after college when faced with adulthood, only you’ve literally been pulled out of a heavenly afterlife. The most interesting implication of In Your Eyes is that Rebecca and Dylan are disconnected from their lives because they are literally focused on each other remotely. However, they handle their special bond so incompetently that the issue is less about detachment and more a case of poor management.
Most surprising is how clumsily the script explains the connection. Dylan and Rebecca exist in a real world so naturally they have to be sold on the idea, but the audience does not. We watch lots of movies where supernatural things happen, especially if we’re Joss Whedon fans. We understand how they talk and feel each other. It’s not that hard to explain, not as hard as an Asgardian god teaming up with a frozen WWII soldier, and that worked out okay.
Dylan and Rebecca have a little fun helping each other out with their skill sets. Dylan knows cars and Rebecca knows cooking, but mainly they just keep each other entertained when they should be paying attention to something else. It’s like they’re texting only way more conspicuously. It doesn’t take a creative genius to figure out they shouldn’t talk out loud to each other in crowded places. A better metaphor would have been having to keep your gift to yourself because the world wouldn’t understand. Now it’s just a story of idiots who keep getting caught.
Whedon really misses the voice of the blue collar. Dylan is an ex-con and still hangs out with criminal types and frequently meets his parole officer. The parole officer dialogue is embarrassing, trying to sound edgy but just sounding like kids sneaking into their parents’ bathroom to swear (everyone else did that too, right?). When Dylan’s partners go over their criminal plan, it sounds not only like every other petty crime story, but rather someone who’s not even familiar with the petty crime genre.
The direct character interactions still follow Buffyspeak, but with references so mainstream they don’t mean anything. “Are you by any chance Satan?” is not a reaction a “regular” person would have, and not clever enough for the Scooby gang to dignify with a witty retort. Jokes about PMS feel like he’s trying to reference other movies where characters talk about gender clichés, but in the format of the Avengers making fun of Captain America for not knowing modern culture. Or Rebecca might just cite the cliché “I made you and I can break you” as a stand-in for flirtation, but I can’t imagine any character, real or fictional, thinking it’s cute. Plus, she didn’t make him and the powers they share together would not make it possible for her to break him, so it’s not even true.
In Your Eyes may have something to say about intimacy when it explores the bond Rebecca and Dylan share without meeting. Kazan and Stahl-David, and Hill, achieve some sensual moments creating intimacy with only one actor on screen. Because it’s a movie, Rebecca still wears her bra while having sex, even when she’s the only person in the scene. I get it, I respect Kazan and since we the viewers are still watching, I don’t expect her bare more than is necessary. It’s just funny to me that the cliché of women wearing bras in PG-13 sex scenes holds even when it’s a supernatural shared consciousness in separate time zones scene.
By the time Rebecca and Dylan guide each other in the parallel climax, it’s less empowering than it is just a contrived payoff to things the film worked way too hard to set up in the first place. The premise seemed like fertile ground to explore some creative issues without requiring visual effects, but In Your Eyes remains frustratingly simple. It almost seems like a failed TV pilot where they were planning to tell some really cool stories in the first season, but they never ended up writing those episodes.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
