Single-Minded

By RICHARD CORLISS

EYEWITNESS Directed by Peter Yates Screenplay by Steve Tesich

William Hurt is long and smooth-muscled and unlined; he looks like an experimental model for the next, higher form of life: Homo computerens. Sigourney Weaver is all beautiful angles and shining intelligence; she could be a Jane Fonda who studied phenomenology at the Sorbonne and washes her face every day with Ivory soap. His voice swoops into baritone breathiness as thoughts pop into his character's mind with the urgency of revelation. Hers is the voice of well-bred reason--behind every line of dialogue there's a Wasp sting. Each actor built a solid reputation in off-Broadway theater; the first film for each was a sophisticated sci-fi horror show (Altered States for Hurt, Alien for Weaver) that exploited the performer's patrician features and willful wit. Now the makers of Eyewitness have conspired to play these two appealing obsessives against each other for off-center romantic comedy.

Daryll Deaver (Hurt) is the night man in a Manhattan office tower; Tony Sokolow (Weaver) is the TV newswoman with whom Daryll has been conducting a one-way, cathode love affair. When they meet at the site of a murder in the building, and he professes knowledge of the crime, she determines to use him as cunningly as any Frank Capra reporter chasing a hot story on the way to falling in love. Daryll is disarmingly direct in telling Tony how much he loves her, has always loved her, and always will. His offer to wax the floors of her apartment constitutes the season's most original metaphor for sexual foreplay ("Then I buff it gently, till it beams"), and, when he finally gets her into his bed, he warns, "I'll tell you right now, it's going to be wonderful." It is. Eyewitness is, after all, a romance of attractive opposites.

Steve Tesich, the playwright whose first movie script, Breaking Away, received the indulgences of a good many critics, writes masterly first acts. He has the Saroyan sense to devise a solid foundation on which his eccentrics and lowlifes dance to their own ricochet rhythms. But when it comes to complicating and resolving a plot, Tesich falls back on the conventions of melodrama. Around the soft center of Daryll and Tony's affair, he has woven a crazy quilt of stereotypes--the cold-eyed killer, the silent accomplice, the wealthy parents, the deranged Vietvet. At the climax--a reprise of Equus--resourceful Daryll does what every dumb thriller hero or heroine must do: wanders into an ominous abandoned building. His assailant is even dumber: he is intent on killing Daryll but won't shoot the horses protecting him.

In a time of inflation, Tesich and his director Peter Yates must be accused of squandering valuable resources. Christopher Plummer, as an activist diplomat, gets to display little more than his profile; and James Woods, who could become the most engaging villain since the young Cliff Robertson, has again been cast in a part that must have been written for Bruce Dern. The sympathetic viewer will want to rescue Hurt and Weaver, not from the bad guys, but from the mechanism of this eyewitless plot. The canny movie producer will want to recast them as the Tracy and Hepburn of the '80s.

--By Richard Corliss

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