MARY REILLY
Julia Roberts, John Malkovich, Glen Close, Michael Gambon. Dir. Stephen Frears, Columbia-TriStar, 1996
On twitter tonight people in my timeline doing one of those film challenges where they post a different movie daily, each corresponding to a different subject, posted on "Movie You Wish You Could Get Others to See."
I spent Sunday watching and analyzing one such, John Dahl's ROUNDERS, but I've already defended it. I'm not part of the game & I don't want to crash their party with a one-off reply. The idea got me thinking, though, of movies that few others like or will even explore though I think they should. In my world that's a list of strange & unlikely titles. Few, however, are as unlikely as Stephen Frears's 1994 Jekyl/Hyde mess, MARY REILLY.
Let me be clear. MARY REILLY is not a good movie. It is not a misunderstood film struggling to find its audience. It is not a new lost classic. (It's not even new. It's 28 years old.) It isn't weird enough, transgressive enough, or repellent enough to qualify a a cult film.
Much of it does not work and doesn't play as nervy chance-taking that falls a little shy of the mark. It's not misunderstood and it's not inexplicably underrated. Its underrating makes perfect sense.
Why is Glen Close in MARY REILLY? For that matter, why is America's Sweetheart, Julia Roberts, in MARY REILLY and why is she doing the worst Irish accent imaginable? Why is Malkovich, America's weirdo, playing a stereotypical London gentleman?
Why is Michael Gambon, just shy of his run of great character parts in US features of the late '90s & 'Aughts, playing Mary's drunken, diddling dad? He's good but the part & the film don't demand an actor of his caliber. Michael Sheen's in it as a footman because it's his second feature & he's young & hungry, and Cieran Hinds turns up because it's a chance to get on American screens, but the star power feels topheavy compared to the material. A lesser cast wouldn't hurt MARY REILLY as much as MARY REILLY threatens to hurt its A-listers.
That said, Frears elicits some interesting moments and surprising performances and, I believe, makes a little more of this mess than its reputation suggests. Not enough to get it all the way to unfairly misunderstood & maligned, but enough that I wish I could convince others to try it & tell me whether I've finally lost it.
For me, the appeal of Frears's misbegotten baby comes out to two words:Jekyl&Hyde. I spent more than a few years around the 12 Step groups, many of which use J&H as a metaphor for their particular addiction. I also tend to be a person of polar extremes, lacking the middle ground that I need.
Personally, I've always thought J&H has more to do with Victorian sexual hypocrisy, with repression vs. permission, and how permission unchecked does as much damage to the larger public as repression to the individual. I don't deny the analogy's validity in the 12 Step world, I just think Stevenson layered it with greater complexity. I find that read of J&H much more compelling than the sober/drunk dynamic, certainly. and each face of the character looks like someone I've seen in my bathroom mirror.
As riffs on Robert Louis Stevenson go, I've seen better, as would most people, I imagine. DR. BLACKYL&MR. JIVE works better. Still, how many riffs on J&H see through the eyes of Dr. J's Irish maid? How many show what Mr. Edward Hyde's "permission" looks like, particularly at its most annihilative? How many ask what sort of woman, what sort of person, could feel romantic love for both Dr. J & Hyde?
Each question lends itself to at least one snarky answer. I don't want to do that. I do not love MARY REILLY because it's a so-bad-it's movie. I don't admire it as many admire any great disaster & its aftermath. There is little enough to love & admire, but what even comes close gets credit, maybe more than deserved, from me.
I DO love the film, & for real, unironic reasons. I must, because its many failings interest me more than aggravate. Other writeups on this blog mention how I came to understand films as a result of conscious, deliberate choices. MARY REILLY mostly doesn't work due to not just bad but incomprehensible choices, like casting Close as a Soho madam, or playing her more over the top than Cruella DeVille, or Roberts's attempted brogue, or Malkovich sounding like an East Coast art gallery attendant rather than a patrician Londoner, or casting Roberts as Malkovich's love interest. They reportedly hated working together. It shows.
Some choices work, though, and some choices which don't became, with time, interesting in ways I know Frears didn't imagine. Take the film's climactic setpiece, the only time we see the Doc transform. Today the effects look incredibad, but they're clearly pre-proto-cgi, from the same era as HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, where the studio shelled out for greenscreened sequences hailed in their day yet dated a few years later.
The effect doesn't look great to me. It looks like animation, which IS cgi, of course, but I pay attention to it each time, wondering if, in '96, Frears & Sony saw a setpiece already aging badly, or see then-standard popcorn-movie magic? Did some of what aged worst here look better in '94?
MARY REILLY was a summer release back when, an intended popcorn blockbuster with a different flavor. It came from the new Sony studios, then being run into the ground by BATMAN producers Jon Peters & Peter Guber who, in their tenure at Sony, failed to produce a significant box office blockbuster or create a reliable franchise. Being one of Guber/Peters's more expensive misreads of the market alone ought to induce a little more viewership. It's a legitimate pop cultural curiosity, an interesting, atmospheric failure in which most of its UK cast rises above the uninspired material while Malkovich goes into full gnaw whenever his Hyde comes out to play. If the leads evince zero chemistry it's still a chance to watch Malkovich work. Roberts may be the most miscast, but she picked this project, ostensibly to break free of romcoms, & I always give her benefit of doubt. If I'm often hard on actresses, in general, the ones I like get every break I can cut them, & I've always liked Julia.
Wildly miscast, her effort not so much to equal Malkovich as to not embarass herself allows me to watch without wincing or mean-laughing as much as I could. She's putting in the hours she needs to become the Julia who powered NOTTING HILL & ERIN BROCKOVICH a few years later. It's no great performance, but it's not agony to watch, either. It's just -- unfortunate.
Have I convinced anyone? If so, I probably lost them again when I kept going well past the point where less would have been more. If this writeup constitutes too much attention to something undeserving, I've no regrets. I haven't even got 'round to admiring Frears for making the movie's moral center not Jekyll or Reilly but George Cole's Mr. Poole, the head butler. Poole's grief as he watches the man he reveres descend into dissolution, as he realizes his passion for keeping a good home cannot save his master, is the film's one rock solid, note perfect performance. As the backstairs staff orbit Mr. Poole, so, too, the film's discursions & excesses. Cole keeps a heap of bullshit from becoming an Everest of offal. Mostly. More than anyone else.
It's about impossible not to damn MARY REILLY with faint praise, but I hope I have also celebrated it in a way that might tempt even one first look. I cannot promise you won't be disappointed. You probably will be. I was. You cannot come back to me & say you weren't warned or that I led you up the garden path, though. If that first-watcher says, as I did, at its conclusion,
"That was not good, but I'm going to watch it again before the rental runs out," and at the end of that viewing says, "Nope. Not great, but I could watch it again, maybe. It's got SOMEthing," I will be pleased, if not vindicated. If it even prompts you to look into Valerie Martin's superior novel, I will have done a great thing here.
If that maiden view, however, draws, "Russ, I tried, man, and I just didn't feel it. You might be seeing what you wish were there more than what is," it won't be the first time I've liked something most ignored (possibly with good reason) nor will it be my first time hearing that. It also won't matter. Every couple years, or whenever a certain mood takes me, I will pull it out and marvel at Stephen Frears's misbegotten and ill-conceived gothic horror picture. I will be glad I did, and glad I wrote something sincere and laudatory rather than working out my hilarious jokes. MARY REILLY may not be a lot of things, but even it deserves better than that.
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