Mary Reilly/Before and After

...As Jekyll, he is made to look as debonair as Ronald Colman, but his speech alternates between pedantry and mush...

...Another problem: John Malkovich's performance is a blot on this otherwise well-acted movie...

...Evil loves innocence," the ad for this movie tells us...

...And the soundtrack is magnificent...

...That is, what is she about to become...

...There are few better ways of hooking an audience than by watching basically decent folks caught through their own frailties in the impersonal toils of the law (think of The Fallen Idol...

...And how he has betrayed his actors...

...But nothing is nothing...

...But there is a delicate creepi-ness to Mary Reilly that survives the skepticism of daylight...

...As Hyde, Malkovich looks readier to smoke a joint than commit homicide and has neither magnetism nor ferocity nor even a hint of Faustian hubris...

...Its director, Stephen Frears, his great cinematographer, Philippe Rousselot, and their designers and technicians have created a late Victorian London (impersonated by Edinburgh) worthy of Sickert and Whistler, a world of blue air and gray fog against which the red paint on a transom window sings out like a cry of agony...

...Bar-bet Schroeder has committed the unforgivable...

...But if scriptwriter Ted Tally had had a gun held to his head and been ordered to expunge every bit of true drama from his screenplay, he couldn't have done a more thorough job of dramaturgical castration than he's accomplished here...

...First, Mary connects Hyde's sexual violence with the childhood rapes inflicted on her by her father...

...A financial failure, it's already being yanked from theaters, but you may want to rent the video at Halloween...

...Well, maybe, but the concept needs a little more justification than it gets here...

...After teasing us for an hour with the mystery of the teen-aged killer's nature, the film then reveals that there's been no murder at all, just an unfortunate and-as staged-totally preposterous accident...

...Jekyll's house is a sumptious cave velveted with shadows, redolent of both Victorian rectitude and timeless evil...

...So why wouldn't he have the guts of the childlike Mary for garters...

...As the father, Liam Neeson is allowed to merely sketch his character as if warming up for a real performance in his next movie...

...In regard to this last possibility, it's worth noting that when Jekyll expires, Mary lies down beside his corpse, but, when she rises, she sees that the doctor's features have turned into Hyde's, and so it is the monster of whom she takes her final, wistful leave...

...the insufficiencies emerge only later, upon reflection...

...Julia Roberts's acceptable performance and lovely face convey muted tendernesss and fear, but why would such qualities give Hyde pause...

...But the two scenes needed to bring this situation to its climax-the court testimonies of each of the parents-aren't in the movie...

...Rather than increasing her revulsion from Hyde, the association leads her into a masochistic fascination with the criminal (She even shields him from the police...

...Already infatuated with her employer, the heroine falls for his monstrous alter ego once she discovers that the two men are one...

...The doctor's laboratory, rather than the usual gloomy closet of other Jekyll-Hyde movies, is a huge, ghastly factory that evokes terror with emptiness and sterility...

...There are close-ups of her here, moist-eyed and blinking, that suggest a high school senior's idea of "emotional" acting...

...Less is more, a philosopher of architecture once told us...

...Mary's strange love is clearly articulated by the intercutting of the maid's current experiences with her memories and fantasies, but Hampton doesn't pursue the implications of the obsession...

...In the hush of Jekyll's house, you seem to hear heartbeats as clearly as footsteps, mice scurrying within the wainscot, resentments murmuring within the breasts of servants, fog brushing against the win-dowpanes, and the hesitant thunder of a storm that doesn't dare to break...

...Second, Hyde, homicidal toward everyone else, comes to feel such compassion, even love, for Mary that he not only spares her but kills himself (and, of course, Jekyll) rather than continue to pose a threat to her...

...A strengthened woman who has gotten masochism out of her system by suffering through it to the point of catharsis...

...Or is it possible that Mary will become a sadist herself, having absorbed Hyde's nature into her own...

...The second action, Hyde's growing love for Mary, is an ingenious notion rather than a truly believable transformation...

...What we needed to see in the heroine was an angelic strength that might challenge a demon, and that's not forthcoming from either the script or Roberts...

...True to the Stevenson original, this beast kicks a child in the stomach merely because the urchin wandered into his path...

...Still, there is one kind of abundance here, for director Barbet Schroeder never skimps on visual cliches...

...The situation could have produced some good, tense moments...

...He has taken the great Meryl Streep-so mysteriously sensual in Sophie's Choice, so earthy in A Cry in the Dark-and turned her into a dear, sweet, wee woman...

...Whatever drama the second hour could produce must come from the psychological squirming of the father who has destroyed evidence in a misguided attempt to protect his child and now must face the consequences in and out of court...

...Instead, each of the parents, after his or her testimony, comes running out of the courtroom and reports on what just happened...

...So compelling are all these triumphs of design and technique that the movie feels unified while you watch it...

...And he doesn't even attempt an English accent...

...Let other moviemakers produce torrents of noise, Frears and his craftsmen have created layers of silence...

...At the movie's conclusion, we know that Mary has been through an emotional journey, but where has it taken her...

...Or, at least, it would have been more immediately disturbing, for its first half suggests that we're watching a study of buried evil, or at least buried rage that has sprung into murderous action and left an adolescent girl dead at the hands of her sixteen-year-old boyfriend...

...And did I hallucinate during the film's one bedroom scene or did Streep really tug her skirt down demurely over her knees as Neeson launched his hulk onto her, as if to tell us that, even during sex, she is every inch a lady...

...I won't discuss the juvenile players because I don't want to be charged with child-actor abuse...

...But though dramatically and psychologically frustrating, Mary Reilly is a sensual triumph...

...An inveterate masochist ready for future demon lovers...

...But it is Meryl Streep who has really been brought down by this wretched movie...

...The Spring Byington of the nineties...

...The script, by Christopher Hampton from Valerie Martin's novel, comprises two psychological actions...

...It tells the Jekyll-Hyde yarn from the point-of-view of the doctor's Irish maid (a nonentity in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel...

...Had Before and After been a good movie, it would have been a greater Jekyll-and-Hyde study than Mary Reilly...