View To A Kill: Sliver (1993)
Ira Levin’s creepy novel of voyeurism becomes quintessential Hollywood sleaze
With fame possible through a myriad of mediums, true movie stars are a dying breed. Some blame the end of the studio system, others say that Hollywood’s emphasis on realism from the 1970’s onward ruined the magic of stardom. But no one denies that Sharon Stone became a true movie star after just one film: Basic Instinct (1992). With her combination of bravado and confident nudity, Stone was catapulted into the stratosphere. She never stopped working, but she was now Sharon Stone, capital letters, in every movie, regardless of the character she played. Her follow up to Basic Instinct, Sliver (1993), was once again written by Joe Eszterhas and clearly intended to capitalize on her new identity as a sex symbol.
The Story
Kay Norris is a divorced book editor who moves into a Manhattan apartment building (the “sliver” of the title), not realizing that it’s been dubbed the “Horror High Rise” because people keep dying there. From the moment she walks in, she’s being watched — the owner has bugged the whole building to get his voyeuristic kicks from spying on the tenants on his secret closed-circuit tv. Kay meets a handsome young man and begins an affair, only to be drawn into the voyeurism herself. As the body count in the building rises, Kay starts suspecting that one of her neighbors is a killer — and can’t stop looking.
The Adaptation
Playwright and author Ira Levin knows that horror is scariest when it’s closest to home. In Rosemary’s Baby, he centered his story around the fears of a pregnant would-be-mother, as she begins to suspect her neighbors of being a satanic cult. In The Stepford Wives, he upends the American dream of marriage and family by creating a world where husbands can replace their wives with androids. He continued the trend with Sliver, where the safety of home is an illusion that’s destroyed by technology. Levin writes in short sentences, keeping the pace fast; he includes real places in Manhattan so that the familiar distracts us from the danger. The voyeur is revealed early but the identity of the murderer remains a mystery; Kay begins to suspect everyone around her and her paranoia overcomes her morality. Levin’s novels focus on private ambitions and desires gone wild and creates worlds where people can get what they want, with terrifying results for others.
Initially, Sliver had all the makings of a hit. The public was wild for more Sharon Stone sex scenes, and Billy Baldwin was the new hot Baldwin brother on the block. Ezsterhas had worked with Stone in Basic Instinct and was given most of the credit for making her star and sex symbol. Unfortunately, that is what sinks Sliver — it was so obviously intended to give audiences the same kind of erotic thriller that Basic Instinct was, minus the femme fatale. The similarity between the two films is likely why Sliver made more than $100 million the box office, and why Sharon Stone could never really get free of her “sexual temptress” persona. But Sliver is more campy than erotic, resulting in more unintentional giggles than shivers.
The movie is sleek, glossy and superficial; it strives for a brooding elegance but fatally lacks any real sense of fear. The cold dread of Levin’s novel never materializes; instead, the movie just revels sleazy in its pleasures. Characters are introduced and killed off before the audience can identify with them, and Kay (now called Carly) focus is entirely on her steamy love affair rather than solving the murder. The long sex scenes, presumably to give Stone fans what they want, interrupt the murder mystery enough that the danger seems to be more that Stone is sleeping with some untrustworthy yuppie rather than possibly facing a murderer. Stone is supposed to play an ordinary, somewhat vulnerable woman here, but it’s not possible; she’s too much of a seductress to be trapped by the likes of Billy Baldwin. As Zeke, he’s supposed to be amoral and irresistible, but his slick charm seems insufficient to tempt and eventually corrupt Kay. For her part, Stone looks constantly troubled by both the sex and the voyeurism; the movie seems to tamp down her powerful presence and punish her for her sexuality, which is typical of an Eszterhas screenplay.
The major change from the book is the ending; screen audiences hated the ambiguous ending of the book. so Eszterhaus re-wrote it to match the audience’s expectations. It doesn’t work; the identity of the murderer seems random and the ending disconnects the voyeurism from the deaths in the building. (The novel’s dramatic ending isn’t that believable either, as it takes the characters away from the claustrophobia of the building) The dark, twisted love story in Levin’s book seems juvenile here, and with the identity of the murderer seemingly pulled out of a hat, the story falls apart. Kay never seems to get any pleasure from her new relationship or from watching her neighbors; Stone’s murderess in Basic Instinct seems far more believable than good-girl heroine here. Sliver should have been enjoyable trash, but instead is tacky and dull at the same time; the only reason to check it out is to Sharon Stone when she was at the top of the Hollywood pyramid.
