MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Jennifer 8’: Edgy Mix of Danger and Romance

Movie thrillers often try to mix danger with romance, but in Bruce Robinson’s strange, flawed “Jennifer 8” (citywide), the fusion is particularly edgy. The lovers are an obsessive cop on the trail of a serial sex-killer, and a blind woman who may be the next victim. Robinson takes this odd pair, played by Andy Garcia and Uma Thurman, and drenches them in new-style Gothic chic: a world of crystalline shadows, lowering skies and punishing sheets of rain.

The lovers are trapped in a region of snow and ice, a Northern California town (re-created in Canada) to which the cop, John Berlin, has retreated after getting burnt out in sunshiney L.A.

Berlin’s obsession with the killer keeps mounting after the first inklings of his existence: bloody body parts in a horrific local junkyard. The killer’s presence hangs over the lovers, as does the disapproval of the other cops, who want Berlin to drop the case and the girl--and also, finally, the edgy possibility that there may be no killer, that all the violence comes from Berlin himself.

Superficially, “Jennifer 8” is in the latter-day sleek-thriller mode of “Jagged Edge” “Fatal Attraction” “Pacific Heights” or “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.” It’s a movie with chic surfaces and maniacal undercurrents. But, though “Jennifer 8” looks like these earlier movies--it has the same brittle, translucent images and knife-edge technique--it doesn’t share all of their basically shallow world view, their formula plots, their yuppie protagonists, their bloody bogeymen.

Here, the milieu is more ordinary; the cops and their families played by interesting actors like Lance Henriksen, Kathy Baker, Kevin Conway and Graham Beckel. This movie tries for a bit more--which may actually be its commercial undoing. The dark surfaces, neurotic undercurrents and complex, tricky dialogue--on a soundtrack that often seems slightly swallowed up or muffled--give “Jennifer” a more opaque, private quality. And unfortunately, audiences often prefer dumbness in their swank thrillers--as “Single White Female” is there to prove.

Robinson, the writer-director of “Jennifer 8,” has written leftist docudramas (“The Killing Fields”) and satiric portraits of British theater (“Withnail & I”) and advertising (“How to Get Ahead in Advertising,” in which a hapless adman developed a truth-telling boil on his neck). Robinson has more wit and dash than most scenarists who work this genre and the elements here strongly recall a 1951 thriller classic, Nicholas Ray’s “On Dangerous Ground.” It’s probable that, like Barbet Schroeder in “Single White Female,” he’s trying to use the thriller form to get, as a director, to a wider audience.

But, as before, he’s questioning the status quo. The cop is a divided man; the department is volatile; the victim is stronger than we suspect; the menace may come from a totally unexpected direction. Robinson is trying to tell a mystery story--he wants to keep us guessing, to consistently undermine our certainty about what we’re seeing--but he’s up against the fact that many audiences these days don’t want to guess. And “Jennifer 8” is also burdened by its expectations and heavy-industrial stylistics. The tempo seems off; even the objet d’art cinematography, another beautiful job by Conrad Hall, gets almost too consciously hypnotic.

Midway through, there’s a sequence that exposes most of the problems of this movie, maybe of the whole genre. It’s a show-stopping interrogation scene, with John Malkovich as St. Anne, an FBI agent questioning Berlin about a possible crime. The grilling has a stripped-down, spider-and-fly quality. Malkovich--his eyes looking deceptively bored, his voice lisping, soft and insinuating, his entire manner radiating an implacable, calm menace--tries to tear the other cop open, gently. The scene is so good, Malkovich and Garcia build and play off each other so expertly, that nothing else in the movie--not even Uma Thurman’s glassy-eyed beauty or the final patented shock payoff--can measure up to it.

“Jennifer 8” (MPAA rated R for language and violence) is smarter than most of the swanky scare machines, but it’s also too hemmed-in by convention and programmed scares. The game is too rigid: the player’s skills are being wasted. The movie, perhaps, should have been built entirely around those Garcia-Malkovich scenes--because it’s in the exchange of glances between those two, the scraped wariness of Garcia, the quiet, almost lazy sadism of Malkovich, that it really chills the blood.

‘Jennifer 8’

Andy Garcia: John Berlin

Uma Thurman: Helena Robertson

Lance Henriksen: Freddy Ross

Kathy Baker: Margie Ross

A Paramount Pictures presentation of a Scott Rudin production. Director, screenplay Bruce Robinson. Producers Gary Lucchesi, David Wimbury. Cinematographer Conrad Hall. Editor Conrad Buff. Costumes Judy Ruskin. Music Christopher Young. Production design Richard MacDonald. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language, nudity, violence).