Sliver Blu-ray Review
Neighbors, Beware
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, September 5, 2013
Manhattan apartment buildings have been very good to novelist Ira Levin. The West Side's
baroque monstrosity, The Dakota, gave him the setting for
Rosemary's Baby, which Roman
Polanski transformed into a classic tale of supernatural fright. Twenty-four years later, a
contemporary fixture in Midtown known as "The Sliver Building", because it had been
architecturally tucked into a tiny space, gave him the locale for a quintessentially Eighties
story of single-living paranoia, which became the film
Sliver. No one would mistake
Sliver for a
classic.
Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who was still enjoying a brief phase of being taken seriously before
the one-two punch of
Showgirls and
Jade sank his reputation for good, adapted
Sliver into a
vehicle for his
Basic Instinct leading lady, Sharon Stone,
ramping up his signature sex and
voyeurism. Australian director Phillip Noyce, between assignments on his two Jack Ryan films
with Harrison Ford, was somehow persuaded to apply his talents in service of Eszterhas' half-baked script, and an otherwise creditable cast signed
on
to recite the laughable dialogue. The
result was panned by critics, nominated for seven Razzie awards and underperformed at the U.S.
box office (although the movie did much better overseas, where Stone commanded an audience
long after her drawing power faded in the U.S.).
Paramount released
Sliver on VHS in both R-rated and unrated versions. The latter ran about a
minute longer and extended the sex scenes between Stone and a male co-star. When Paramount
issued
Sliver on DVD in 2006, only the unrated version was included.
Warner is now releasing
Sliver on Blu-ray under its three-year license deal with Paramount, and,
for reasons on which I speculate in the "Video" section, the Blu-ray contains only the
theatrical
cut. There are two ways to view this development. One, which will be embraced by fans of
Sliver
(and every movie has its fans), is that they are being denied a proper Blu-ray version of their
beloved film. The other, which can be shared equally by theatrical format purists and those, like
me, who find
Sliver a dud, is that the Blu-ray is one minute quicker to sit through.
Stone plays Carly Norris, a mid-thirties book editor at a New York publishing house who has just
left a bad marriage after seven years. She rents an elegant apartment on the twentieth floor of a
building on East 38th Street, but doesn't learn until after she moves in that the prior resident,
Naomi Singer (Allison Mackie), died in a fall from the balcony. Other residents stare at Carly
when she moves in, because, in an eerie twist, she resembles the deceased former tenant.
Noyce has already shown us during and immediately following the credit sequence that Naomi
Singer was murdered by a mysterious hooded figure who threw her over the balcony railing. The
device is presumably intended to make everything about Carly's new abode suspicious and
unnerving, but Noyce lacks any feel for the paranoia peculiar to New York apartment living. (A
scene featuring a power outage while Carly waits in the basement for her laundry to dry is
particularly uninspired; it required someone with Brian De Palma's touch.) The best Noyce can
manage is to linger over the gallery of suspicious characters that Eszterhas borrowed (and
frequently altered) from Levin's novel.
There's the NYU professor, Gus Hale (Keene Curtis), who behaves inappropriately by
introducing himself to Carly in a local grocery store with the unconvincing disclaimer that he's
not a dirty old man. Her English neighbor on the twentieth floor, Vida Warren (Polly Walker),
behaves like a model or an actress who is always traveling for work, but in fact she's an
expensive call girl. Crime novelist Jack Landsford (Tom Berenger) is a chauvinist has-been,
whom Carly's boss (Martin Landau) wants her to woo over to their publishing house just in case
he starts writing again. And then there's the shyly handsome Zeke Hawkins (William Baldwin), a
video game designer who works at home, which gives him ample opportunity to lurk about
watching everyone come and go, especially Carly, whom Zeke just happens to meet on her first
day moving in (or was he waiting for her?).
As
Sliver progresses, several of these potential suspects drop out for various reasons, and Carly is
lured by one of them into a torrid affair that is supposed to be equal parts erotic and disturbing,
because it may be the runup to her murder. But the love scenes fall flat, because even with
Stone's best efforts—and it's not clear she's giving
Sliver her best—Carly is a poorly drawn
cipher. Bruised, unsure and reticent to the point where her crass co-worker Judy (Colleen Camp)
is constantly yammering at her to get out and date, Carly is apparently so innocent that she
remains unconcerned when a "secret admirer" gains access to her locked apartment to leave her a
gift. (Any credible 30-something single woman would be dialing 911 and have the locks changed
before the night was out.) Yet under her new partner's influence, she transforms into a sexual
omnivore and a public exhibitionist quicker than you can say
9½ Weeks. All the while we're
supposed to believe that Carly's suspicions about the cause of Naomi Singer's death are
continuing to grow. Carly's not a person; she's a stack of plot functions.
Sliver adds a voyeuristic overlay to this rickety thriller by showing much of it through a bank of
TV monitors from a location that, for a long time, remains undisclosed. Someone has rigged the
building with hidden cameras in every apartment, sparing no tenant their privacy. Is it the killer?
An investigative lunatic? A whacko voyeur who will, in a few years time, invent reality TV? I
don't think I'm spoiling anything when I say that it doesn't matter who's bugged the rooms or
why.
Sliver's plot is so arbitrary that even the identity of the killer could be easily changed when
the original ending didn't test well. Unlike Eszterhas'
Basic
Instinct, where the killer's identity
and the film's fraught love affair were inseparable from who the characters were at their core,
nothing in
Sliver feels connected. They're random pieces from the Eszterhas Script Assembly
Kit, and Carly's last line applies more to the film than to anyone in it: "Get a life!"
Sliver Blu-ray, Video Quality
Paramount's 2006 DVD of
Sliver raised several major issues, one of which has been carried over
to the Blu-ray. The film's Oscar-winning cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, shot
Sliver in
anamorphic Panavision, which would normally have a projected aspect ratio of 2.39:1 and should
be presented on home video with an AR of at least 2.35:1. However, for unknown reasons,
Sliver
was presented on DVD, and is again presented on Blu-ray, at 2:10:1.
The cropping at the sides isn't severe enough to cause obvious issues except during the opening
sequence, where a slight optical squeeze has been applied to prevent credits from being
truncated. An example is included in screenshot 6.
Why was this done? No one is saying, but at least one other film shot by Zsigmond (
Playing by
Heart) has been treated similarly on home video. Then again, perhaps the technical crew
responsible for this Blu-ray simply followed the conventions established in 2006, without
questioning how or why those decisions were made.
A second issue raised by the 2006 DVD was the poor condition of the element, which showed
significant dirt and damage. Here, the news is much better. The source material for this Blu-ray
appears to be in excellent condition, which may hint at the reason for the use of the theatrical cut.
It's possible that the unrated cut, or at least the additional footage, was of poorer quality or would
have required more expensive restoration work than Paramount felt was justified for a bargain-priced catalog title. In any case, the source used
shows
none of the problems noted on the DVD.
The Image on Paramount/Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is consistently detailed, finely
resolved and film-like, with a natural grain pattern that is never obtrusive. Blacks are solid, and
shades of gray are well-differentiated—an essential element of the image when banks of black-and-white TV monitors are on display. The palette can
be vivid at times, because Levin's novel
was set in the New York of the late Eighties, when both fashion and decor were colorful. But the
key scenes in
Sliver occur in dim light, and the Blu-ray's delineation of shadow detail is up to the
task.
I was surprised to discover an average bitrate on the low side at 21.85 Mbps, but
Sliver doesn't
have a lot of quick action or rapid editing. In any case, I didn't encounter any artifacts.
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