mrs harris and huff good summer

"Mrs. Harris" and "Huff": Good Summer Television

I just got a chance to watch Phyllis Nagy's film Mrs. Harris, which

I'd taped from HBO some weeks or months ago (see

http://www.hbo.com/films/mrsharris/). The film stars Ben Kingsley as

the Scarsdale Diet doctor Herman Tarnower, who was murdered in the

early 1980s by his long-time lover/companion, Jean Harris (played by

Annette Bening), the headmistress of a girl's prep school in

Washington, DC. Written and directed by playwright Phyllis Nagy, the

film is a smart, compelling combination of narrative fiction and

mock-documentary, investigating the sometimes murky, sometimes clear

reasons that drove Harris to commit the crime and, most importantly,

telling her story against a cultural backdrop that explains more about

her motivation than any of her actual actions.

Nagy tells the story in a non-linear way, beginning with the literally

stormy night of the murder and jumping back and forth in time to

relate how Tarnower and Harris met and how their complicated affair

proceeded over the years. Interspersed are "interviews" with friends

and other people who knew Jean and Hy, including Hy's mother and

sister (played satirically as a Jewish suburban matron by a nearly

unrecognizable Cloris Leachman). The story is distanced in a Brechtian

way, while at the same time, the narrative pulls us into complicated

identifications with Harris, from whose perspective the emotional

details unravel.

Harris is a straitlaced middle-aged white woman in the 1980s, and her

relationship with the Brooklyn-born Jewish doctor lifts her into a

more reckless, carefree style of living. Tarnower seems a cad from the

outset, although Kingsley plays his charisma as infectious, if

offbeat. These two wonderful actors make it plausible that such an

unlikely couple would be attracted to each other. Tarnower seems

uncouth within the ostentatious displays of his wealth, which ground

the film's production design--he boasts of his money, of his less than

privileged background, and of his sexual prowess (in an amusing,

highly theatrical scene in which Kingsley appears to strut naked

through a locker room, literally turning the heads of the men he

passes). His laugh is a caustic bark and his sexuality is narcissistic

and infantile.

While Nagy's screenplay doesn't quite explain what draws Harris to

him, Bening's performance demonstrates how she comes alive in his

presence. His disregard for convention appeals to some hidden

anarchistic streak in an otherwise proper life. Her own more radical

subconscious is hinted at when she uses the precisions of language to

dessicate the egos of people she disdains, typically men with power

over her, or Hy's family, who disapproves of his relationship with

Jean. She's clearly a powerful woman, constrained by a traditional

role and traditional expectations, who's straining against everything

she's been brought up to be. Bening's performance is wry, mordant, and

deeply respectful of Harris's intellect, even when the choices she

makes seem incoherent or insane.

When Tarnower brutally rescinds the marriage proposal he offered, for

instance, Harris nonetheless stays with him, accommodating his need

for other women until his relationship with a nurse in his office

(played by Chloe Sevigny) seems to drive her over the edge of

jealousy. The murder is staged as accidental; the fatally depressed

Harris apparently means to kill herself, but the gun goes off when she

visits Tarnower late on that fateful rainy night, and he dies from the

gunshot wound because the storm has knocked out the phone lines and

they can't call for help. By then, Harris is nearly catatonic with

grief, jealousy, and rage.

Bening's ability to capture the far edges of the character's

sanity--from her sometimes priggish, impeccably bred bearing and her

sharp retorts to lawyers and police officers she clearly finds beneath

her, to the disheveled, exhausted, vulnerable woman taken into custody

the night of the murder--makes her sympathetic and captivating, a real

study in feminist dignity from a woman who at the same time seems to

have debased herself in this relationship.

Mrs. Harris is a smart, thoughtful, funny, feminist film, capturing

the irony of Harris's position and the absurdity of Tarnower's

posturing while at the same time narrating the complicated set of

emotions and attractions, needs and desires that made them an

explosive, doomed couple. In the process, Nagy recalls something of

the early 80s zeitgeist, that moment when the first rush of

second-wave feminism was receding, beat back by the avaricious,

masculinist capitalism of the coming decade. As Harris tries to

maintain her self-respect and her position, she finds herself battered

by the very anti-feminist forces that Tarnower in some real way

represents. The diet he popularized, for instance, controlled women

just as he controlled his lovers. The audience can't help applauding

just a little when Harris inadvertently kills him (although the film

also suggests that the murder might have been premeditated--rumination

on the possibility isn't the most interesting aspect of the

narrative).

Phyllis Nagy is a playwright I've long admired. Her plays include the

surrealistic time-traveling romp, The Strip, as well as the chaotic,

compelling Weldon Rising (see

http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth02C22O341012627085).

It's heartening to see someone with an original voice and an

insightful feminist perspective working in cable television. Rent it.

Huff is another cable network presentation, this time Showtime, that

was recently cancelled (according to People Magazine) after a

two-season run (the season one DVD is now available). Hank Azaria

produced the series, and stars as a pychiatrist whose home life is

more neurotic than any of his patients' (see

http://www.sho.com/site/huff/home.do). Although he's presented as a

successful professional, married, with one teenage son, an alcoholic

mother (played by the masterful Blythe Danner, who was nominated for a

2005 Emmy Award for her work here), a schizophrenic brother, and a

father emotionally missing in action, Huff is one of the more

long-suffering, introspective white male characters I've ever seen

written for television.

The show is ostensibly about this man, yet it's the women who carry

it, from his wife, Beth, who begins the series with a career as a

caterer and ends it with profound doubts about every choice she's made

in her life; to his mother, Izzy, who was traumatized when her now

hospitalized younger son tried to kill her; to his secretary, Paula,

an African American woman of great faith who brings a kind of

certainty into a household of doubting skeptics, to Maggie, the

secretary who cleans up emotional and physical messes for the lawyer

Russell, Huff's self-destructing best friend.

In addition to the surrounding cast of layered, interesting female

characters, Huff himself is femininized, his position as family

caretaker and certainly as patriarch always challenged and placed in

doubt. His own shrink (played with an ironic twinkle by Angelica

Huston) calls attention to Huff's own propensity to try to save

everyone but himself, guiding him through an acid trip meant to loosen

his somewhat constipated relation to his own emotions. His actions

always seem wrong, his anger and his concern ill-timed and misguided.

While he's also written as a sympathetic character, the narrative

disavows any need to protect him as its protagonist or to make him an

unambivalent hero.

The most fascinating male deconstruction on the show is Huff's friend

Russell, played with astonishing virtuosity by Oliver Platt (also

Emmy-nominated this year). Although Russell is the epitome of a

self-involved, fast-traveling LA corporate lawyer, the character is

written as entirely flawed, flailing about carelessly in the crumbling

protection afforded by his privilege. He excuses his behavior as

taste, insisting he's a guy who likes to "party hard." But his actions

become more and more irresponsible as the series progresses, his drug

and alcohol abuse and sexual proclivities more alarming, and even his

inexplicably loyal secretary finally can't clean up his messes.

Meanwhile, he's also written as very smart, a wily lawyer who despite

his cutthroat power, seems to side with the good guy.

In a drunken bacchanalia, he impregnates a rather ordinary woman

(played with deep respect, in a role that could have devolved into

cruel parody, by Broadway performer Faith Prince) who decides to keep

the baby. The second season narrates Russell's lightning fast flips

between the seductions of a faithful fatherhood and the enticements of

his prostitutes and drugs. Kelly, the mother of his child, recognizing

that Russell might not be trustworthy, empowers herself as an

erstwhile single mother, working with a doula (who ironically turns

out to be less dependable than Russell) who insists on assisting her

baby's arrival into a birthing pool set up in Kelly's small apartment.

The season two finale ends with the inadvertent overdose of Russell's

prostitute friend and the birth of his son, who he delivers himself

when the errant doula fails to show.

Although there's something a bit smarmy about recuperating a character

who's most interesting for his flaws by the marvel of childbirth, if

the series had continued it would have been interesting to see how the

writers addressed Russell's refusal to bow to convention, despite the

birth of his son. And Kelly was never written as someone who wanted

Russell fulltime in her life; she's more concerned with his character

because of what he might genetically pass on to her child.

Likewise, although Huff's mother, Izzy, seems to pull herself out of

her alcoholic haze (which allows Danner to deliver some of the best

lines I've ever heard on television), and although the last episode

shows her coming to the rescue of her schizophrenic son when he

suffers a very dangerous psychotic break, Izzy has been established as

too richly contradictory to be pulled into a conventional narrative of

motherhood. Huff, suffering a midlife crisis when his marriage with

Beth falters, takes some time away from the family, and is shocked

when Beth doesn't automatically welcome him back when his self-imposed

separation comes to what he thinks is an appropriate end.

The series is full of surprises, and holds interest with the sometimes

curious, always imaginative and compelling quirks of character that

comprise its texture. After the very dramatic cliff-hanger of a season

finale, I was dismayed and disappointed to hear that Huff might not be

back (I'm determined to believe that People didn't check its facts).

We need all the smart, feminist-inclined television we can get. Rent

season one and look out for season two on Netflicks.

Yours, with TIVO,

The Feminist Spectator

posted by Jill Dolan at 7/22/2006 03:23:00 PM

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