Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Sliver Blu-ray Movie 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 Movie, 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 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.

Sliver Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

I no longer have Paramount's 2006 DVD, but my recollection is that it contained a Dolby Digital 5.1 track. That would have to be a remix, because Sliver's original theatrical audio format was Dolby Stereo Surround. That track is what the Blu-ray offers in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, and it sounds just fine, with solid bass extension, wide dynamic range, clearly centered dialogue and reasonably immersive surround presence when played back through a good surround decoder. There's very good stereo separation across the front soundstage, which is especially important in reproducing the cacophony of voices for scenes featuring the "video wall" of TV monitors that spy on multiple apartments simultaneously. Howard Shore's score is one of the film's best elements.

(It's a guess on my part, but since the 2006 DVD contained the unrated cut, I suspect that any 5.1 remix was limited to that version, which would explain why it wouldn't be available for the theatrical cut presented on Blu-ray.)

Sliver Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No extras are included. I believe there were no extras on the 2006 Paramount DVD, but I have been unable to confirm this. Reports exist of significant deleted footage, but it is unclear whether it was preserved.

Sliver Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Phillip Noyce is a gifted director who has made some memorable political thrillers. My personal favorite is The Quiet American, though I also appreciate the craftsmanship of a mainstream blockbuster like Clear and Present Danger. But Noyce wasn't suited for Joe Eszterhas' particular brand of sleaze, especially when Eszterhas wasn't even making his best effort. A different (and better) screenwriter might have appreciated the authentic paranoia in Levin's novel enough to create a worthy script and give Noyce and his cast something to work with. Instead we got Sliver. Except for the abbreviated aspect ratio, the Blu-ray is a good reproduction of the theatrical experience. I can't recommend the film.