Mrs. Harris
First screened in March 2006 / Reviewed in July 2024
Director: Phyllis Nagy. TV Movie. Cast: Annette Bening, Ben Kingsley, Cloris Leachman, Frances Fisher, Chloë Sevigny, Frank Whaley, Bill Smitrovich, Lawrence O'Donnell, Michael Gross, Mary McDonnell, Philip Baker Hall, Margaret Easley, Ellen Burstyn, Brett Butler, Lee Garlington, Larry Drake, Lisa Edelstein, Jessica Kate Mayer. Screenplay: Phyllis Nagy.

Photo © 2005 Killer Films/Film4, © 2006 HBO Films
Mrs. Harris is the kind of movie I'd like to see more often on major actors' résumés, even if I still can't summon as much organic enthusiasm as I'd like for how this particular one turned out. Both in script and direction, Phyllis Nagy has made adventurous and difficult choices, especially compared to how easily this real-life episode might be red meat for Americans' apparently insatiable and frankly weird hunger for fact-based murder stories.

Nagy's creativity and the shared eagerness of crew and cast to push against expected grains, digging unexpected tunnels through this scenario, yield some valuable results. The two versions we get of the night Jean Harris (Annette Bening) murdered her straying husband Hy Tarnower (Ben Kingsley) open a plot-crucial chasm of which account is true. Even better, they're each beguilingly strange in staging, rhythm, action, and performance. Neither feels like something that would really happen, nor like something a person would easily make up. In overall design, not just in plot and performance, the life of the well-to-do looks just this side of dreary; with all this money, these are the colors you dress in and decorate with? Bening and her American Beauty costume designer Julie Weiss are clearly good collaborators. You can't tell if the clothes inspired the performance or vice versa, and they never feel like "costumes," even as you question some of Jean's decisions while shopping. In these and other ways, Nagy maintains a satirical edge but doesn't lampoon these people in the most overt ways she might have. Very much by design, her dialogue is also so odd in diction, syntax, and delivery that you can't just fluff your couch pillows and settle in for an easy spoof.

Mrs. Harris, then, sometimes feels like what you'd get if Whit Stillman took a stab at Reversal of Fortune. Hopefully that strikes you as a brave, weird spiking of a war-horse recipe, which is my favorite thing about the movie. I'm still not convinced it sounds like something I want to sample, though, and there's the rub. Mrs. Harris is often clearer about the clichéd choices it's avoiding than about the rationale and payoff for its own choices, scene-level or systemic. Knowing Nagy's play scripts as I do, I can imagine the vignette-ish structure and vinegar stylization as a punchy night of theater. It's a little easier in that environment to let fragmentary scenes across a huge spectrum of tones just collide into each other and let the audience sift it all out. The actors also have more liberty to push more into farce on some nights, pathos on others, complex psychology at the matinee and masklike impenetrability for the post-dinner crowd, especially if they sense our reactions and want to fiddle with them.

I don't think that's impossible on film. In this particular medium, though, still fairly new to Nagy, or just in this execution of her Mrs. Harris script, I'm not convinced she got there. She leans really hard into into music and sound elements (modern takes on jazz standards, thunderclaps that sound like pistol shots) that seem intended to bind a tonally and structurally erratic movie into something more cohesive. But I think these accoutrements are too foregrounded, and frequently too kitsch; they also feel like a hedging of the film's bets on keeping us uncomfortable. The conceit of enlisting a couple dozen actors, some more famous than others, as a combo of Greek chorus commentators and TV-special talking heads only makes Mrs. Harris feel more arch and ironic—even if these cameos make you ask again why Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, and especially Mary McDonnell aren't in everything, if only for two minutes, or even 20 seconds.

I'm all for arch, but at some point that sensibility starts floating free from the material: intransitive ironization, with too little object. The court-trial sequences don't reflect much of a stake. Meanwhile, the human drama among Jean, Hy, his mistresses, her private-school students, and her dwindling handful of friends don't culminate in a whole lot of insights, even the mood is juicy or sly. Spin the same word a different way: Mrs. Harris feels like an engineering oddity, an arch spanning outward from a foundation in tabloid fact but leading nowhere else. It's a bridge with only one abutment. You can admire the fact that it's standing at all, this emblem of whimsy and of refused expectations. But what's it for, and where are we going?

My clearest reason for going back to Mrs. Harris while writing about 20th Century Women was to reinvestigate another movie, albeit a wildly different one, in which you're meant to get a completely different impression of Bening's character from scene to scene, without the woman or the performance simplistically "resolving." I like that Bening favors parts like this and sometimes pushes them even further in that direction, especially when the approach capitalizes on her stage-trained chops for indicating character through gesture, posture, timing, and vocal work. I do wish she were afforded a little more looseness here, which directors almost never asked from Bening in this period or the many years leading up to it. I don't know that Jean Harris ever relaxed, exactly, but she clearly had a sense of humor, and it's implied she had a carnal response to her husband even if she wasn't fully comfortable with sex. Painting a little more with these colors of wit and desire, or the intriguing charisma some of her pupils describe in her, might have even further complicated this portrait of Jean while also clarifying it more than Bening or Nagy has managed. They get extremely little help, I'm sorry to say, from Ben Kingsley, whom I very rarely believed at any level of his performance and who seems destructively committed to an utterly charm-free take on Hy Tarnower.

I can see why several of these takes, of Bening and of Kingsley and of others, might have been the most interesting choices available in the editing room, especially if Nagy and her comrades were eager above all to wrong-foot their audience frequently and to extract some idiosyncrasy from a lived episode and a lurid genre that shrivel all too easily into triteness. But I question the wisdom of building a whole movie out of the strangest, most astringent takes, especially when the script is already making nothing easy, as much as I admire the guts and artistic commitment involved. I leave the movie feeling like I got invited to a dinner party by a host whose cooking is more "interesting" than delicious. I still could have savored an offbeat meal, and sometimes I did, but Jesus, why did she seat us all night in furniture designed to be uncomfortable? Grade: B–

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)

Emmy Award Nominations:
Best Made for Television Movie
Best Director (TV Movie/Miniseries): Phyllis Nagy
Best Actress (TV Movie/Miniseries): Annette Bening
Best Actor (TV Movie/Miniseries): Ben Kingsley
Best Supporting Actress (TV Movie/Miniseries): Ellen Burstyn
Best Supporting Actress (TV Movie/Miniseries): Cloris Leachman
Best Screenplay (TV Movie/Miniseries): Phyllis Nagy
Best Casting (TV Movie/Miniseries): Junie Lowry-Johnson & Libby Goldstein
Best Cinematography (TV Movie/Miniseries): Steven B. Poster
Best Costume Design (TV Movie/Miniseries): Julie Weiss & Elaine Ramires
Best Makeup (TV Movie/Miniseries): Tina Roesler Kerwin, Elisa Marsh, Julie Hewett, and Michele Baylis
Best Hairstyling (TV Movie/Miniseries): Bunny Parker, Susan Schuler-Page, and Elle Elliott

Golden Globe Nominations:
Best TV Movie/Miniseries
Best Actress (TV Movie/Miniseries): Annette Bening
Best Actor (TV Movie/Miniseries): Ben Kingsley
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