From love to loathing

The title may be, simply, “Mrs. Harris,” but this new movie about Jean Harris’ conviction for the 1980 shooting death of “Scarsdale Diet” Dr. Herman Tarnower is very much about both of them. Looking back over their 14-year relationship, it sees two deeply connected people who slipped slowly, inexorably out of alignment with each other.

Entering HBO’s movie rotation Saturday at 8 p.m., the picture presents Annette Bening as a strongly principled, hard-working, single mother of two who finds herself in a fairy-tale romance with Ben Kingsley’s wealthy, charismatic doctor. As their middle-of-life infatuation settles into dull routine, however, another woman enters the picture, as do prescription drugs. Harris’ quickness and poise devolves into weariness and paranoia, while Tarnower’s attentiveness shifts from that of fascinated lover to that of doctor studying a patient.

It’s a psychologically rich study of love’s mutability, presented in a boldly stylized, darkly comic manner by playwright Phyllis Nagy, working from her own screenplay as she makes her film directing debut.

Right from the opening title sequence, the movie slyly addresses the ways in which the shooting impressed itself on the American public. Here was a story that titillated the nation yet left it a bit rattled. After all, if the respected headmistress of an exclusive private school could end up on trial for shooting her bestselling doctor of a lover, you had to wonder: Is absolutely anyone capable of such things? Myself included?

Barely has the title scrolled across the screen when gunfire erupts in excerpted, classic-movie scenes of Louise Brooks, Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson and others portraying women pushed to extremes.

The story then plunges straight into the shooting. It’s a dark and stormy night when Bening’s Harris shuffles into Tarnower’s sleek, Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired bedroom in Purchase, N.Y., and tiredly raises a gun to her head. An almost comic wrestling match ensues, as the gun repeatedly goes off or goes flying.

Two versions of the shooting frame the story. This first is Harris’, the second is the chief prosecutor’s. In between, the 14 years of the Harris-Tarnower relationship unfold in a format that adopts, yet playfully subverts, common storytelling techniques.

It’s a courtroom drama that has Bening’s Harris all but openly ridiculing the prosecutorial techniques of Frank Whaley’s George Bolen, looking cartoonish behind giant wire-framed glasses. Details of the story are categorized under chapter headings -- “Opening Statements,” “Cross Examination” and so on -- as courtroom scenes give way to snapshots of the relationship. Period music wryly underscores many of these developmental scenes, as at Harris and Tarnower’s first meeting: Their eyes lock across a crowded dining table and all sound fades away, to be replaced by the sappy strains of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”

Meanwhile, documentary-style “interviews” are added to the texture. Portraying Tarnower’s sister, a sour-faced Cloris Leachman tells the camera that Harris was jealous of the doctor’s fame. Elegant Frances Fisher, as Harris’ best friend, admiringly describes her pal as strong, unconventional and uncompromising. And if you watch closely, you’ll notice that Ellen Burstyn, who portrayed Harris in a 1981 TV movie, makes a stealthy cameo interview appearance as one of Tarnower’s past lovers.

The tone can and will be criticized as inconsistent. One scene in particular has been much talked about since the film’s appearance at the Toronto and Palm Springs film festivals. Staged almost like a musical-comedy chorus number, it sends Kingsley strutting regally through a locker room to cause a ripple effect as men turn to stare at his purportedly massive endowment.

“Mrs. Harris” neither blames nor beatifies. Harris and Tarnower come across as a post-sexual-liberation-era couple who were too independent-minded to marry, too brainy to be anything but brutally honest with each other and, well, too much of just about everything for them to ever be able to live happily ever after.

Still, there’s something quietly heartbreaking about the decline charted by Bening as she changes from the Holly Golightly-like figure, dressed in radiant pink, who waits for Tarnower’s chauffeured Cadillac to whisk her off to an evening of dancing, to the hollow-eyed, dead-voiced zombie who materializes in his bedroom one fateful night.

“I feel so safe with you,” Harris tells Tarnower at one point, to which he replies: “No one is ever safe with anyone.” How sadly true that turns out to be.

*

‘Mrs. Harris’

Where: HBO

When: 8 to 10 p.m. Saturday

Ratings: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)