DVD Review: Mrs. Harris (2005)
For some reason this TV movie was nominated for a ton of Emmys and Golden Globes. This movie is slow, dull and badly written. The best part of the film is a great performance by the eternally wonderful Annette Bening, and I have no idea how she pulls it off because the script and director and certainly giving her no help.
This is the story of the girlfriend of famed dietician Herman Tarnower (Ben Kingsley, smarmy and great) who shot him in cold blood while claiming that she only intended to kill herself.
Bening plays Jean Harris as the together and confident woman she surely was, but we are never really given a good idea of why such a woman would be attracted to the womanizing and chauvanistic Tarnower. Harris says again and again that she wants to be told where and when instead of asked, but for such a complex character as Jean Harris this seems a pathetic excuse that doesn’t ever really work.
This movie is dull, but Bening gives it light.
Grade: C+
Just goes to show how divergent opinions can be. I thought the writing was outstanding and the film pretty good. Bening is wonderful, but so is Kingsley. I’d give it a B+, easily. Hilarious and tonally challenging, which I appreciated.