Basic Instigation? Indecent Disposal?

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

"You like to watch don't you," the ads for Sliver ask, breathlessly leaving out all the proper punctuation marks, thereby implying that other, more significant proprieties may have been violated in the movie itself. If we're honest with ourselves, we have to answer, "Well . . . er . . . um . . . yes."

For a movie screen is, among other things, a big lighted window. And we, watching in the dark, are, among other things, voyeurs, always hoping to see forbidden sights. Sliver's vulgar lure is that we will be allowed to peep at Sharon Stone in various stages of undress, in a variety of compromising positions. Its somewhat more interesting premise is that she is a projection of our watching selves, a respectable Manhattan publishing-house editor named Carly Norris, who is herself drawn into voyeurism. In other words, we are invited to watch a watcher as she learns to like watching, and to reflect -- not very deeply, it must be said -- on the consequences that accrue to her as a result.

Sliver might have made more of this aspect of Carly's psychology, but it is fixated on the fact that when she moves out of a bad marriage and into the high-rise that gives the film its title, she is in a near-terminal state of horniness. This explains her implausible attraction to Zeke Hawkins (William Baldwin), who is creepy at first glance and does not improve on longer acquaintance.

Zeke is the secret owner of the building and the secret sharer of his tenants' lives, for he has wired every room in the place and keeps tabs on everyone via closed-circuit TV. This makes him a prime suspect in the wave of violent deaths that has lately plagued the premises. Once Carly discovers his state-of-the-art electronics, he somehow becomes more attractive to her. This is possibly because the only other prospect Joe Eszterhas' script makes available to her is a mystery novelist (Tom Berenger) made understandably surly by impotence and writer's block.

They constitute a glum triangle. It is extremely difficult to care which of the two guys may be the resident psychopath, and neither the script nor Phillip Noyce's direction creates a growing, compelling sense of menace around Stone's character. In fact, she is presented more as an object for study than as an object of sympathy -- that is to say, rather voyeuristically. It is, of course, possible to see this as artful irony, given the film's theme, but it feels more like carelessness. Or exploitation. Or simple imitation. For like Eszterhas' somewhat hotter, somewhat smarter Basic Instinct, or the more recent Indecent Proposal, what this movie really wants to gaze upon is high- toned decor, and like its predecessors it treats its female star mainly as part of the furnishings, something that might get scratched or worn down -- rendered, shall we say, unusable. This is bad sexual politics. It is also bad, unsuspenseful moviemaking.