Video Voyeur: The Susan Wilson Story Reviews

Say what you will about the overwrought TV-movie formula; it's been honed across decades, networks, and now cable channels until it's the ideal vehicle for condensing yesterday's headlines into today's entertainment. This vehicle for former Law & Order star Angie Harmon is better than most such efforts because it injects some creepy visual ideas into the familiar formula. For the entire buildup to Susan Wilson's discovery of neighbor Steve Glover's tacky little hobby, Video Voyeur's scenes of suburban bliss are intercut with blurry, surveillance-tape images of Wilson at her most private moments: showering, making love to her husband, even changing into bathing suits with her teenaged daughter. The script frequently mentions footage of her using the toilet, but no such scenes actually appear. They don't need to -- by now the movie has driven home its point that voyeurism is alluring for the watcher but a horrible invasion for the watched. Once Glover's transgressions are revealed, the film quickly descends into the depression-therapy-triumph outline of countless other similar efforts. But until then, Jamey Sheridan is effectively disturbing as the forcefully nice, freakishly solicitous Glover. Harmon, too, works a credible performance out of her down-to-earth persona and attractive drawl. On tour around the same time Video Voyeur was released, comedian Sandra Bernhard performed an original song about Harmon's alleged fudging of her birth date; it is a little strange to see an actress who admits to being 28 play a housewife with a daughter old enough to drive. Still, for all its injection of Hollywood glamour into middle-class quietude, Video Voyeur is a fairly strong piece of infotainment.