By Lisa Tsering

It’s a stretch to believe glamorous Uma Thurman as a flinty, desperate barfly from blue-collar New Jersey. But director Mira Nair does her best to coax out a compelling performance from the Oscar-nominated actress in Hysterical Blindness.

The film premiers on HBO Aug. 25 and costars Juliette Lewis and Gena Rowlands.

The performances are watchable, but don’t get your hopes up; it’s no Monsoon Wedding.
Lacking Monsoon Wedding’s lightness and serendipitous magic, Hysterical Blindness feels instead like an acting exercise. Perhaps it is: Thurman optioned and developed the script by Laura Cahill, which was adapted from the writer’s pay of the same name. The “hysterical blindness” is a medical condition brought on by Debby’s (Thurman) frequent anxiety attacks.

Debby’s relationship with her best friend, Beth (Lewis), and her mother, Virginia, a coffee shop waitress (Rowlands), evolves as the three fall in and out (mostly out) of love in 1987 Bayonne, New Jersey.
Cinematographer Declan Quinn (Monsoon Wedding, Kama Sutra, Leaving Las Vegas) adds a dreaminess to the grim, urban landscape, and a few shots – traffic seen from a moving car, or sunlight shifting across a landscape – are close enough to shots in Monsoon Wedding to prompt a double take and wonder if its New Delhi we’re glimpsing at and not New Jersey.
“In working with [Cahill’s script] I tried to preserve the quality of not being to dialogue-heavy,” observes Nair, “but rather relying on the strength and enormity of the actors…
“As a filmmaker, I use image first and foremost to create volumes of emotion, without always relying on expository language. If you can capture the inexplicability of life, the extraordinariness of ordinary things, then you’ve captured something of life.”
See for yourself when the film airs on HBO Aug 25, 28 and 31; and Sept 3, 9, 15 and 18; and on HBO2 Aug 26.