For roughly an hour, “All I See Is You” offers some mild but genuine intrigue as a stylistic exercise. To try to convey the way Gina (Blake Lively), a blind woman who lost her sight in a car accident during her honeymoon in Spain with her husband James (Jason Clarke), sees the world as a result of her physical handicap, director Marc Forster (with his first movie since the troubled but successful “World War Z”) uses a slew of visual and aural devices: anamorphic distortion, extreme blurring of shots, amplified/distorted sounds.
The results aren’t quite as rigorous in its stylistic commitment to point-of-view as Julian Schnabel’s attempt to translate Jean-Dominique Bauby’s coma-based paralysis to the screen in “The Diving Bell And The Butterfly,” but Forster’s weaving in and out of Gina’s perspective has its own logic in the context of a film about a form of blindness that is more than just physical.
“All I See Is You” is also initially interesting to watch in a narrative sense. In chronicling the shifting emotional dynamic between Gina and James, Forster and co-writer Sean Conway forego such standard storytelling devices as exposition and establishing shots in favor of a series of quick vignettes, thereby forcing us in the audience to pick up on crucial narrative and character details on the fly. Such an approach allows the plot — which tracks the tensions that develop between the two after Gina undergoes a successful operation that restores most of her sight — to develop in a way that feels as if it’s arising organically from real life. (There are passages in the first half of the film that almost feel like a glorified vacation reel. In this case, this is meant as a compliment.)
Notice, however, that these two major virtues of the film have everything to do with formal elements, and precious little to do with the two main characters themselves. Unfortunately, that’s because Gina and James are, frankly, not terribly interesting to observe. It’s as if Forster and Conway figured that it was enough to make Gina blind and James super-devoted in order for us to feel emotionally invested in their fates.
But James — who works an insurance job in Bangkok, one that’s apparently well-paying enough for them both to live in luxury as expats — seems to exist primarily for his wife; and Gina herself doesn’t seem to have much of an inner life outside of her husband beyond giving the occasional guitar and singing lesson. Take away Forster’s hard-working visual style, and what “All I See Is You” essentially presents is a standard relationship drama, with two generic, privileged people at its heart who don’t become any more striking even as the tensions between the two gradually reach a breaking point.
It’s those interpersonal tensions that pave the way for the film’s undoing, as “All I See Is You” strains to become a thriller in its second half. There is an interesting idea underpinning their evolving relationship: As Gina becomes more self-reliant with her sight restored, James begins to feel less useful to her (a feeling buttressed by his discovery that he’s sterile, which is the reason why they’ve been unable to conceive a child). Because Gina and James are so dull, however, this arc remains more intellectually abstract than dramatically visceral. Worse than that, however, are the turns toward over-the-top melodrama Forster’s film takes in its final act — twists that not only beggar belief, but also cast Gina in a misogynistic, vaguely femme fatale-ish light that completely undoes whatever goodwill the film engendered in its relatively more compelling earlier stages. [C]
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