This film was atypical of the many high-caliber films produced by HBO. "Mrs. Harris" played like a generic network made-for-television biopic. The normally excellent Ben Kingsley and Annette Bening were both mediocre, and the main problem was with the teleplay. The structure of the film was odd in the use of flashbacks interlarded with the courtroom scenes. The actual relationship of Jean Harris and Herman Tarnower was downplayed, as the film progressed through vignettes that were simply variations on a single stormy and turbulent argument.
The result was a one-note film with one-note performances. Tarnower was portrayed as a boorish womanizer, Harris as a pill-popping neurotic. There were no levels and no depth to the characters. Because the film-maker refused to take a stand on the actual sequence of events during the shooting, multiple versions of the crucial death scene were staged, and the viewer was left with no greater understanding of the events at the end of the film than at the beginning.
This was amateurish film-making with no substantial research apparent and no integrity in attempting to come to terms with this enormously publicized and scrutinized murder. Astonishingly, the film even attempted to integrate comedy with short cameos of actors playing friends and relatives and directly addressing the camera. The scenes did not work, and they tended to trivialize a serious subject.
In the tragic killing of Dr. Herman Tarnower by Jean Harris, there might have been the potential for a film to shed light on why Mrs. Harris pulled the trigger inflicting fatal gunshot wounds on the doctor. Unfortunately, this shallow film lacks intelligence in the scripting and fails even to deliver the kind of compelling drama that one may find in purely fictionalized films about a crime of passion, such as "Play Misty For Me" or "Fatal Attraction."
