At First Sight (1999)

Our hero finds himself walking the chick flick route in this absurdly premised piece of late 90s nonsense that's apparently based on a true story. Kilmer's character is just like every other adorable, softspoken, hockey playing, blind professional masseuse in a small upstate New York spa town, named Virgil. He smiles awkwardly throughout the whole movie. The story begins when he meets a nice new girl, who is a fancy uptight city dweller played by Mira Sorvino. She goes to the spa out in the country to take a break from her high pressure career as an architect or something. She gets a little crush on the massuese only to realize halfway through a conversation "Oh fuck! He's blind!" Kilmer's smiley Virgil goes home and brags to his seeing eye dog about the new girl he met (really). Very presumptuous on his part, but he's not wrong, she comes back to pursue this gentle, smiley fellow in earnest.

The course of the romance in "At First Sight" seems puritanically slow moving. They kiss and fool around a bit and she's inviting him to move in with her in the city. Then she discovers an ad for an optomologist who swears he can restore Virgil's shattered vision. Virgil throws a goddman passive aggressive hissy fit at this. His creepily overprotective sister let's Mira Sorvino know that he's gone through a bunch of procedures back in the day that all hurt really bad. Doctor Nathan Lane gets all lasik on his peepers and before you know it, he's restored. But he doesn't know what seeing is all about so he loses his shit! He starts freaking out bigtime and it's way overdramatically executed.

Oh, so the love interest's architecture firm consists of Kilmer's girl and her ex-husband. So, that's not awkward at all. Kilmer has a really hard time adjusting to the whole 'sighted culture' stuff but eventually he starts getting the hang of it. Mira Sorvino doesn't like him so much now that he's basically just another dude without a disability to make him seem idioscyncratic and exotic. Plus she gets really impatient with teaching him a bunch of seemingly obvious things that would be really hard for someone who had never seen anything before to comprehend. She's kind of a bitch. She starts straying and has a totally weird kiss with her ex. Tisk tisk.

So it's kind of a mixed bag for ol' Virgil. Sure he can see, but all he's really seeing is his relationship fall apart. Then things take a turn for the worse. In a twist right out of Flowers for Algernon, his vision starts to fall apart. (Spoiler alert): Pretty soon he's back to being really blind but still living in New York and helping out other blind folk. Eventually Mira Sorvino decides she loves him and wants to be with him again since he's back to being blind and exotic. She's presumably no less of a bitch but he agrees. True love conquers all.