‘Hysterical Blindness’ Takes a Clear-Eyed View

Debby doesn’t have much luck with men. Her father took off when she was 13, and no guy since then has hung around either.

As the HBO movie “Hysterical Blindness” catches up with her, Debby (played by Uma Thurman) is advancing ever deeper into adulthood, with no steady guy in sight. Accompanied by her best friend, Beth (Juliette Lewis), she spends most nights at the local watering hole, hoping that, somehow, Mr. Right will bubble up out of its depressingly limited gene pool.

After a particularly painful humiliation one night, she tearfully asks the bartender: “What’s wrong with me? I really wanna know.”

“Maybe you don’t see things so clearly,” he replies.

Sight, or self-perception, is central to this emotionally true, visually arresting movie, which arrives Sunday at 9:30 p.m. Under the sure direction of Mira Nair, it studies the cycle of self-doubt that has enveloped Debby’s mother, Virginia (Gena Rowlands), as well as Debby and Beth, and encroaches on a third generation: Beth’s bubbly, 10-year-old daughter, Amber (Jolie Peters).

The story unfolds in working-class Bayonne, N.J., in the late 1980s. It’s an era of big hair and little skirts, and Debby and Beth head to the bar looking trashier than the “Holiday”-era Madonna.

Social expectations and economic limitations, as well as personal circumstances, have really done a number on these women. Debby and Beth are each other’s primary emotional support. Yet, at the slightest sign that one of them might be hitting it off with a guy, jealously sets in and they abruptly turn vengeful.

Guys aren’t much better off. The bartender (Anthony De Sando) and a bar-goer (Justin Chambers) who catches Debby’s eye are trapped in their own vicious cycles.

Nair, whose movies include the Oscar-nominated “Salaam Bombay!” and the gorgeous, complex “Monsoon Wedding,” tends to use whiteouts between scenes to suggest Debby’s blurry vision. And, working with cinematographer Declan Quinn, she keeps throwing in shots of bridges--symbols of connection, or of the other paths these women might take.

Thurman optioned and developed this script by Laura Cahill, based on Cahill’s play. Clearly, Thurman feels strongly about the material, and she bravely disappears into her part. From beneath a helmet of Farrah hair and behind a raccoon mask of eyeliner, her eyes telegraph hunger, hurt and, every now and again, hope.

Lewis is also affecting as the sunnier Beth, while Rowlands, as Virginia, is quietly luminous around her late-in-life Prince Charming, played by Ben Gazzara.

Humor bursts forth unexpectedly, and the whole movie is beautiful. Just like these women, if only they could see.