Mrs. Harris
October 2006 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

The story was all over the papers in the early ‘80s. It was as unlikely as it was salacious: Mrs. Jean Harris, the genteel head-mistress of an exclusive girls’ boarding school, murders her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, celebrity author of the best-selling Scarsdale Diet. Her weapon was what gun dealers then were calling the "suicide gun," cheap and poorly made. "All it had to do was go off once." But the gun went off five times that night. Four of the five bullets hit Tarnower, and the fifth went into his bedroom wall.

Harris’s defense was that she was suicidal because Tarnower had taken another lover, that she had driven five hours to his home to say goodbye and then kill herself, that in a struggle over the gun he was shot and killed. The jury didn’t buy it, and Harris served 12 years.

The case seems open-and-shut, but the movie sets out its ambiguities. For one, Harris, now long out of prison, has never once recanted her claim that Tarnower’s death was accidental. Screenwriter and director Phyllis Nagy dramatizes the shooting twice: in an early scene enacting Jean Harris’s version of events, and the same scene near the end as the prosecutor saw it. The differences in fact are slight. Nagy uses a documentary format, interweaving actual scenes of the romance and of the trial with conflicting commentaries by Harris’s friends and enemies spoken directly to the camera, most memorably by Cloris Leachman as Tarnower’s adoring sister, seated on a beach chair alongside his headstone.

Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley are superb as the doomed couple. Kingsley’s Tarnower is arrogant, womanizing, selfish -- and attractive. Bening reveals all the repressed frustration and loneliness of an underpaid professional woman on her own in a man’s world. Their sorry relationship takes more than a decade to reach its sad climax, yet the film keeps it all interesting. The before-and-after of their romance, according to the director’s commentary, is expressed in the cinematography. When Tarnower and Harris fall in love, they are shot in color as lush as overripe fruit, but Harris’s downfall in the courtroom is lit in grainy, cold fluorescent blue. The skin tones in both cases look natural on this DVD, and there is always good detail; it’s a clean, even transfer. Nagy says her score cues are the "obsessional love songs" of the period, like the ever-sexy "Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You" when Harris first meets Tarnower or Roy Orbison’s "Crying" when Harris discovers Tarnower’s new lover. The audio overall is adequate if not spectacular.

The featurettes include an audio commentary between the two stars that never seems to take off and one by the director that does. Nagy describes the film’s challenges from the interesting perspective of a first-time director. The all-too-short third feature, "Mrs. Harris for the Record: Firsthand Accounts," includes a statement from the felon herself, now back in the world and still unrepentant, and from her two devoted sons. Her defense attorney recalls her "weeping buckets" in private when they went over the events of that night, but the prosecutor remembers that when Harris gave her testimony, she was "mean as a junkyard dog." In this her first film, Phyllis Nagy trades the sensational for the enigmatic.

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