Roberts falls flat on her famous face in `Mary Reilly'
There is something mysterious about a whisper. Perhaps it's the air in the voice or the repressed urgency that whispers tend to have that suggests something hidden, something deep, maybe even something important is at hand. That is probably the appeal of the Mary Reilly previews, the whisper at the end of the ads that leaves us with a creepy sensation of morbid curiosity.
Unfortunately, whispers don't always make good on their intimation of interesting stuff. Sometimes whispers are hollow, nothing more than a little hot air strung out at a lower decibel level.
This is basically what we're dealing with in Mary Reilly , nothing really urgent, nothing really interesting or developed, definitely nothing important.
As the movie's story goes, Mary Reilly (Julia Roberts) is the housemaid of Dr. Henry Jekyll who is played by John Malkovich, practically the only thing this movie has going for it.
Reilly, who was abused as a child, lives and works in the house of Dr. Jekyll and proclaims that she feels "safe" there as she goes ever so timorously about her menial tasks of scrubbing the walkways and dusting books in the library.
Roberts refuses to play Reilly as anything but exasperatingly one-dimensional. It would seem that Dr. Jekyll had previously put an ad out for house help that specifically called for those women who had happened to fall victim to the old "if you hold that face for too long, it'll stay that way forever" adage. Reilly is supposed to be traumatized by the experiences in her past, not made irretrievably dismal and annoying by them. Roberts has some trouble distinguishing among these characteristics.
Malkovich, on the other hand, comes as close as this screenplay will allow him to playing the complex Dr. Jekyll to the original level of perpendicular duality that author Robert Louis Stevenson had intended. Malkovich's Dr. Jekyll is at once excited and unmistakably paranoid. His Mr. Hyde is both comical and disconcertingly violent, like someone out of a Quentin Tarantino film.
Unfortunately, Malkovich's Oscar-caliber penchant for character interpretation is cut short by the naive dialogue and ludicrous plot development that plagues this movie.
This is precisely the problem with Mary Reilly . It tries to be so many things at once: a Shellyian love story between a repressed scientist and a trepidatious housemaid, a heart-pounding suspense thriller and an introspective commentary on the two-fold nature of mankind, and, ever so disappointingly, it ends up being just confused and garbled, a mixed bag of muddled accents and an inordinate amount of stammering.
The movie's finale is perhaps the ultimate betrayal of the director's doubt about his own work. At the end, we are treated to a gratuitous special effects extravaganza in which we see Alien -esque creatures pushing through skin and tearing at spinal cords.
This doesn't make up for sitting through two hours of uninteresting drivel. Instead, catch the other Robert Louis Stevenson flick out this weekend. Muppets are infinitely more interesting than Julia Roberts on a perpetual bad hair day.
This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the March 1, 1996 issue.
Copyright © 1996 The Rice Thresher. All Rights
Reserved.
This document may be distributed
electronically, provided that it is distributed in its entirety
and includes this notice. However, it cannot be reprinted
without the express written permission of:
The Rice
Thresher, Rice University, 6100 Main, Houston, TX 77005-1892, USA.
The Thresher Online Project -- ethresh@rice.edu