Malice could turn out to be the new season’s pop mystery-suspense melodrama you won’t want to miss. The film is deviously entertaining from its start through its finish, when most such movies go as irretrievably to pieces as Margo’s face at the end of “Lost Horizon.” “Malice” stays the course. If it were a car, it could be called a mean machine. Though light of weight, it hugs the road around every hairpin curve in its cruel and twisty narrative. Cruel?
As written by Aaron Sorkin (“A Few Good Men”) and Scott Frank, and directed by Harold Becker (“Sea of Love”), the movie opens on a gorgeous autumn afternoon with a montage of shots of an idyllic New England town that is the seat of a women’s college rather like Smith. A pretty student bicycles home after classes, looking so pure and clean that it’s axiomatic that something unspeakably dirty is about to happen to her. Two minutes later, as her cat watches nonjudgmentally from under a chair, she is brutally attacked by an unseen intruder and left for dead.
Cut to the operating room in the local hospital sometime later: Jed Hill (Alec Baldwin), a hotshot brain surgeon, is working to save the young woman’s life. While doing incredibly adept things with scalpels, clamps and suction pumps, he’s also insulting his O.R. associates with his sarcastic, supremely arrogant put-downs and asides. Jed is more than self-assured; he’s high on the fun of the bloody business at hand. The thought arises that he might be the person who is raping and killing pretty young college students with alarming regularity.
In this way begins a convoluted tale of murder, lust, greed and mendacity. In addition to the charmingly vain and therefore suspicious brain surgeon, the principal characters are Andy Safian (Bill Pullman), the mild-mannered but seemingly staunch dean of the women’s college, and his adoring wife, Tracy (Nicole Kidman), who works in a day-care center and wants nothing more than to have her own children.
Tracy takes an instant dislike to Jed, which, as anyone familiar with such fiction knows, indicates that there must be a turnaround of those feelings at some point. Yet when it comes, it’s not something easily predicted.
Andy is fascinated by Jed. Star-struck, really. It turns out that years before they were classmates in high school, where Jed was a glamorous football player and Andy the nice, quiet, unassuming school drudge. To help pay their bills, Andy invites Jed to rent the top floor of the old Victorian mansion that he and Tracy are still in the process of paying for and doing over.
Jed becomes every landlord’s nightmare tenant: he plays rock music at top volume at all hours. The ceiling fixtures shake as he entertains a string of giggly women, who are inclined to moan loudly when making love and who always run, never walk, to the bathroom afterward.
Tracy wants to kick him out. Andy defends his campus idol. It is Jed, though, who operates on Tracy when emergency surgery is necessary. He saves the patient but leaves her incapable of having children. That trauma transforms Tracy into an unforgiving termagant.
More about the story cannot be told without giving away some of the nifty surprises in Mr. Sorkin’s confident, spooky, sometimes very funny screenplay. Mr. Baldwin is capable of playing all kinds of roles well, but maybe no one else in films today has his menacing physicality and vicious humor when playing conceited bullies with slicked-back hair. He’s cold as dry ice (“Glengarry Glen Ross”) and sometimes deadly (“Miami Blues”). His performance in “Malice” is simultaneously comic and scary, never more so than in a sequence in which he rationalizes his freely admitted God complex.
Ms. Kidman, always considered a serious actress in Australia where she began her career, has mostly been set decoration in her American films to date. For a change, “Malice” gives her something comparatively substantial to do.
Though Tracy Safian has little in common with Isabel Archer, the heroine of Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady” — a role Ms. Kidman is scheduled to play in Jane Campion’s forthcoming film adaptation — her work in “Malice” suggests for the first time that she has the range and quality to become quite special. Bill Pullman also does very well in a role that allows the audience to suspect the worst about Mr. Nice Guy.
The excellent supporting cast is headed by Peter Gallagher and Bebe Neuwirth, while George C. Scott and Anne Bancroft are super in very small but vivid one-scene set-pieces, Mr. Scott as a famous old doctor who looks like God, and Ms. Bancroft as one of life’s boozy drop-outs with a taste for single-malt whisky.
Mr. Becker’s direction and Gordon Willis’s cinematography serve the exuberant cleverness of Mr. Sorkin and Mr. Frank’s screenplay. No matter how wild the plot reversals, there’s always a slightly madder one to come.
Malice (1993)
Directed by: Harold Becker
Starring: Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman, Bebe Neuwirth, Peter Gallagher, Anne Bancroft, George C. Scott, Josef Sommer, Debrah Farentino, Gwyneth Paltrow, Diana Bellamy
Screenplay by: Aaron Sorkin, Scott Frank
Production Design by: Philip Harrison
Cinematography by: Gordon Willis
Film Editing by: David Bretherton
Costume Design by: Michael Kaplan
Set Decoration by: Tracey A. Doyle, Garrett Lewis
Art Direction by: Dianne Wager
Music by: Jerry Goldsmith
MPAA Rating: R for sexuality, language and some violence.
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: October 1, 1993
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