"Mary Reilly"

Last night I literary stumbled upon a movie I have not seen previously before - "Mary Reilly" - one of those movies that somehow slipped under my attention,God knows was it because my nomadic lifestyle, constant moving & traveling or simply I was not attracted by main actors, however now I gave it a chance and surprisingly found myself mulling it over in my head even this morning.

It is a interesting re-telling of a famous 1886. novel "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson that was a huge bestseller in its time and supposedly freaked out even Queen Victoria - a case of split personality (good and evil in one body) later celebrated trough theatre and movie adaptations - each time a new re-telling would move away a little bit further from the original so today it seems nobody is aware of a main twist in a story, that not until very end we find out that both Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde are in fact one person. This is the way novel was written originally and it was the main mystery of the story - later in theatre and in the movies the role would have been played by the same actor so with time it has lost its element of initial surprise.

Back to the movie. 

It is a re-telling so of course we approach the story from a completely different angle - in fact, several main characters from the novel are completely erased here (Dr.Lanyon, Mr.Utterson) or some other like Mr.Enfield are shown in a second. This movie is all about the story as seen from a perspective of a "maid" (who was completely in the background of the novel) and it also gives an interesting starting point to other,future movie adaptations of the famous literary classics where we could possibly follow the story as re-told by other characters. No wonder Disney is just around the corner with another adaptation as told by Dr.Jekyll's little dog, few mouses and a street cat. 

What I really enjoyed about the movie was the way certain long gone era was brought to screen - everything is happening in a scary, grey, cloudy and misty city bustling with ugliness, nasty screaming people, dirt everywhere except in a Dr. Jekyll's clean house that must have been seen as a elegant Haven to poor servant Mary Reilly. Of course the house itself is not so safe as we find out later, neither it has a particularly happy atmosphere - five servants are working hurriedly and silently around Dr.Jekyll, running up and down the stairs for him, polishing his shoes,ironing his shoe laces and what not. But I was fascinated with a clever way movie makers reconstructed the whole victorian era without showing anything particularly historic - we simply know when the story is happening without seeing much. The costumes, the furniture, occasional horse carriage, inside of a whorehouse, everything was done by perfection. The way house servants are silently and submissively working around the "master" carefully avoiding expressing their humble opinions, clear fear of losing the job that hangs above Mary Reilly's head as she works from the early hours up to the evenings, the little details thrown here and there, I found them excellent. 

Naturally as the movie was made relatively recently, it had to hint to Mary's troubled background - of which Stevenson never bothered to mention as he only wrote about doctors, politicians and aristocracy - script writers were inspired to guess she must have been impoverished and tortured (movie hints, abused) child who escaped poverty and probable death from starvation with life in permanent work (" in service") and would do anything to stay safely indoors. As shown in the movie, Mary Rilley is a little bit too delicate to really be a house servant - if she was really a child from the streets who survived by her own wits, she would have been more similar to brassy servant who sleeps in the same bed with her, not a genteel servant who is shocked to walk in the streets and can hardly wait to came back in the house. 

The main reason why I avoided this movie for such a long time were main two actors about who were so omnipresent in the cinema for the last several decades that I lost any interest to ever see them again. Sorry Julia Roberts and John Malkovich but its a clear case of overkill. At certain point it really felt like I can't see the movie without at least one of them playing in it. And yes, they are famous and celebrated and its all right but please move over and give a chance to somebody else. So I approached the movie with certain suspicion but it turned out fine - as I said earlier, the costumes and atmosphere (perpetual fog) made it up for everything else. I could think about hundred other actors in the places of genteel, aristocratic and melodramatic Julia Roberts (highly unlikely house servant) or nervously twitching Malkovich but supporting actors were fine and I was delighted with scene stealing cameo by Glenn Close who put more spirit and humor in her five minutes on the screen that both main actors together in a whole movie. It is a interesting gothic thriller and I could easily recommend it even if it lays too heavily on big budget Hollywood stars - but ideas in the script were interesting and I loved a fresh look at the old literary classic.