By Michael Sandlin

In what is essentially an anti-docudrama laced with absurdist Cohen Brothers-style humor, this based-on-a-true-story HBO affair could’ve easily become another facile spoof. Yet writer/director Phyllis Nagy employs enough ironic goofing to punch up an otherwise skillfully rendered downbeat tale of murder in suburbia. The film focuses on the schoolmarm-turned-murderer Jean Harris (Annette Bening) and her hopelessly obsessive pursuit of personal identity through Scarsdale Diet founder and ladies’ man Dr. Herman Tarnower (Ben Kingsley). 

Although the cast is padded with veteran thespians, it’s Nagy’s irreverent toying with dramatic structure that really drives things along. The film’s jarring chronological juxtapositions of Tarantino-esque flashbacks and forwards add substantive dramatic motion to the story. Nagy masterfully brings Jean and Herman’s alternating past and present lives to a dramatic crescendo, by which time the doomed couple’s guises have peeled away and only raw, twitching nerves remain. The script is also cleverly book-ended by two different dramatized versions of the circumstances surrounding the killing: Did Harris intend to murder Tarnower as the prosecution claimed, or did she accidentally shoot him while he struggled to prevent her from committing suicide? 

After Tarnower shrewdly conquers Harris through empty promises of marriage, he unrepentantly takes up with his vacuous young secretary (Chloe Sevigny). He cruelly plays upon Harris’ weaknesses for years and also gets her addicted to a brain-melting combination of prescription drugs. Although soulless cretin Tarnower is ultimately the so-called “victim,” he’s also a thoroughly unsympathetic character. Nagy’s handling of Harris borders on empathy. Late in the film, you detect a sadly eloquent poetic soul lurking beneath all the bluster: “Being me is like sitting in an empty chair,” Harris confesses. “I was a person who no one ever knew.” 

Kingsley is equally adept at handling all facets of Tarnower’s personality: the simple country physician, self-consciously masculine Brooklyn Jew and Tarnower the creepy amoral narcissist. Bening’s on-screen transformation from the awkwardly demure pose of Harris’s younger self, to the pill-addled, acid-tongued, homicidal Harris is an achievement well beyond her closet-psychopath real estate broker in American Beauty. Until this DVD, premium cable was the only place you’d find this sort of quirky and risky filmmaking.