"Mrs. Harris," a trippy new HBO film airing at 8 p.m. ET Saturday, bills itself as a "darkly comic tale" that revisits the 1980 killing of Herman Tarnower, the renowned diet doctor, at the hands of his lover Jean Harris. Tarnower's death caused an immediate sensation at the time, driving his Scarsdale Diet book back to No. 1 on the best-seller lists.
Meanwhile, Harris, a 50-something headmistress at a Virginia girls' school, was portrayed in the press as a wronged woman, whose beloved "Hy" had abandoned her for younger blood.
Indeed, "Mrs. Harris" at first seems like it's going to be a movie about the perils of crossing Jean Harris. The opening credits are a montage of old black-and-white movies featuring jilted lovers pumping bullets into the cads who dun them wrong.
But as we soon learn, there's more to this film than that. "Mrs. Harris," which stars Annette Bening as Jean and Ben Kingsley as Hy, offers a fascinating psychological autopsy of two articulate and intelligent people who, as Bening puts it, "only argued about the use of the subjunctive," yet wound up destroying each other.
Harris and Tarnower both emerge as emotionally damaged people: He a relentless seducer of women who was incapable of committing fully to any one, she a divorcee with two sons whose tough exterior masked a need for intimacy that was eating her alive. Together they made quite a couple. "Mrs. Harris," adapted from a best-selling book about the case, recounts many of the happy times they shared, but there's always a tinge of comedy to those scenes, as if to ask, "Why is she falling in love with this man?"
When they first meet at a dinner party in 1966, the conversations around Hy and Jean continue, but it's like someone has taken a mute button to them. All she can hear is Hy's voice, accompanied by the tune of "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You." Even then, there are dark clouds. As Hy leaves he spends a little too much time saying goodbye to all the lovely ladies in the room.
But Hy makes Jean feel special, and so for the rest of his life, she is his. We watch as Hy moves on to other conquests and Jean slowly comes unglued, yet gamely refuses to become unstuck from him.
The story of how these two drift apart and finally become an affair in name only is told in a hopscotch of flashbacks and fast-forwards. These are interspersed with scenes from the Harris murder trial and footage made to look like early-1980s interviews with various intimates of the couple.
The constant toing-and-froing of "Mrs. Harris" might have gotten tiresome, as an earlier HBO effort at revisionist biography, "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers," did. Bening, though, is somehow able to conjure up a completely new mood for each time and setting.
She is combative and snobbish in the courtroom, dazed and disoriented in the police house, smitten and hopeful in the earlier courtship scenes, growing ever more unstable as the '70s drag on.
She medicates herself with an ill-advised mixture of uppers and downers, prescribed to her by dear Hy, of course. Finally, her discontent boils over in a long letter, filled with psychotic hate, that she unfortunately mails to him just before driving up to his house in a raging thunderclapper on that fateful night.
"Mrs. Harris" presents two competing re-enactments of Tarnower's killing, reflecting the defense and prosecution scenarios offered at Harris' murder trial. The jury sided with the prosecution, of course, but the public sided with Harris.
In 1981 Ellen Burstyn portrayed her in "The People vs. Jean Harris," a miniseries that aired on NBC shortly after the trial ended. Burstyn said at the time that she took the role "to make sure they treated Jean Harris gently." That Burstyn did -- too gently, it seems, as even Harris was heard to complain that she was never as mousy on the witness stand as Burstyn was.
It may be a little surprising to see Harris depicted in this movie not as a meek little doormat but as a voluble, foul-mouthed, pill-popping, self-hating doormat. My guess is that the real Jean Harris, who has been quiet about this latest portrayal, is happier that Bening is a lot more interesting to watch than Burstyn was.
As for Kingsley ... while I agree that the real Hy Tarnower wasn't much in the looks department, the photographs show a man quite a bit more dashing than the bald, beak-nosed actor playing him here. But with his warm, attentive eyes, even Kingsley can conjure up that knee-weakening quality that has defined many a ladies' man.
Hunting is an overworked metaphor in the film, but it certainly seems to describe the doc's modus operandi. And it produces the film's signature moment, when Tarnower brings Harris breakfast one morning in his dining room. These are clearly happier times for the couple.
As the music swells, and they dote on each other, the camera circles around them, slowly tilting upward, redirecting your gaze to the four walls of the room. There you see the other trophies in Tarnower's life: the birds, fish and wild game he captured when he wasn't out hunting and gathering women.
By some uncanny stroke of timing, the film is airing the same week that law enforcement officials are scouring the Midwest looking for Toby Young, a married dog trainer and prison volunteer who apparently disappeared with a convicted murderer she allegedly helped escape from the Lansing State Prison.
I'm fascinated, like many of you are, with what causes a woman to tie her fate so inextricably to a man she has no business being with. "Mrs. Harris" doesn't solve this mystery, but it's a reminder that such tales are not just last week's news.
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