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Mrs. Harris is HBO's fact-based tale about the tumultuous relationship between Jean Harris and Scarsdale Diet author Dr. Herman Tarnower, whom she is accused of shooting to death in a jealous fit of rage. But it's also a cautionary tale about what can happen when a woman is so obsessed with a man she'd rather die--or kill--than be left behind. As Harris notes when she's on trial for his murder, she doesn't understand how "something that ugly and sad could've happened between two people who didn't argue, except over the use of the subjunctive." As the oddly paired lovers, Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley do a formidable job with their roles. She is a well-educated social climber teaching at a girls' prep school. He is a wealthy doctor who loves her enough to propose marriage, but not enough to go through with it. She sticks around for 14 years, hoping she'll outlast all his other mistresses. When her best friend suggests she find someone worthy of her, Harris scoffs, "I despise decent men. ... Cruelty isn't a crime. Boredom is." Unfortunately, the film--even with all the sensationalistic background material--is a meandering production that evokes boredom and impatience rather than viewer's pity, anger, or understanding.
--Jae-Ha Kim
Review
The murder of Scarsdale Diet inventor Herman Tarnower could easily have become fodder for a Lifetime TV movie starring, say, Meredith Baxter or Jane Seymour. Luckily for premium cable devotees, it instead inspired this wonderfully tart HBO movie, which subverts docudrama clichs at every turn. In a part as smart and sour as her role in Being Julia was steely and grandiloquent, Annette Bening plays spurned lover/murderess Jean Harris with a lethal combination of self-knowledge and fatalism. Harris never asks to have her romantic hopes raised, but once they are, there's no returning to her previous state of expertly cultivated complacency. As persnickety Dr. Tarnower, Sir Ben Kingsley oozes equal parts charm and condescension. The doctor's carefully articulated rules and regulations provide a perfect defense against other people's expectations. Director/screenwriter Phyllis Nagy teases out these careful characterizations in a playful narrative that bounces between times, perspectives, and moods. If there's a problem with Mrs. Harris, it's that it tries almost too hard to avoid movie-of-the-week boilerplate. The fractured chronology sometimes saps the story of emotional weight, while the amused tone threatens to descend into glibness. On the whole, however, Nagy's approach gains more than it loses, as in the scene where Tarnower's outsize genitalia earns envious stares from the guys in the locker room and voice-over testimonials from his many ex-lovers. This single, amusingly literal sequence tells the audience all it needs to know about this self-satisfied alpha male -- and that's but one example of Mrs. Harris' terrific cinematic shorthand. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
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