The made-for-HBO drama Mrs. Harris has the sort of opening that gets a movie lover's hopes up. Over the beginning credits, a montage of old movie clips displaying women shooting down their no-good male counterparts rolls to the jazzy strains of "Put the Blame on Mame." This snazzy opening makes the fact that the film following it is a big washout all the more unfortunate. Mrs. Harris could have been a deliciously dark and snappy tale of a woman scorned, but it comes across more like a blah biopic.

Jean Harris (Annette Bening) was your average divorcee, working in the educational system and proudly raising her two sons in the mid-1960s. That was before she met Herman Tarnower (Ben Kingsley), a charismatic "country doctor" who would go on to achieve nationwide fame as the man behind the "Scarsdale Diet." Together, the two embark on an  affair, with Jean enjoying living the good life alongside the man she loves -- or at least until learning she's not the one and only in Herman's life. With certain "male blessings" and a crackerjack personality, Herman attracts attention from various ladies, so much so that he has second thoughts about proposing marriage to Jean. Of course, Jean isn't going to take this lying down, and the film attempts to reconstruct the chain of events leading up to a tragic night in March of 1980 when the doctor is shot dead and Jean is holding the smoking gun.

Problem number one with Mrs. Harris: it never finds the time to decide what it wants to be or what to do with its characters. First-time director Phyllis Nagy has assembled a  fine cast here. The leads are played by three-time Oscar nominee Bening and Gandhi Oscar-winner Kingsley, and the supporting cast includes such familiar faces as Ellen Burstyn, Frances Fisher, Cloris Leachman, and Michael Gross (remembered by most for "Family Ties" but loved by me for his hilarious role in the Tremors movies). However, when it comes down to dressing up the barn and putting on a show, Nagy shows the decisiveness of someone debating whether to get the chicken nuggets or a cheeseburger at McDonald's.

Mrs. Harris always seem to be on the brink of delving deeper into its characters, only to abandon this route in favor of moving onto the next topic in the story. Viewers are left with  a series of half-baked characterizations only partially fleshed-out. The performances suffer as a result, and it's a real shame considering how many fantastic players are at work here. Bening does what she can as Jean Harris, who's supposed to be mentally-disturbed and a tad psychotic from the get-go, but her performance seems so low-key because of the script's confusion about how to approach the character (wronged lover or a woman who should be off to the funny farm?), one is never sure where the film's loyalties toward this character lie.

Kingsley, who's in need of a good role after slumming it in  BloodRayne and Thunderbirds, is more at fault for his own lackluster performance here, taking the character of a doctor who's the life of the party and a man everyone likes, then  playing him as so much of a boisterous jerk, you wonder who would even hang out with the guy for five minutes!

And you might as well forget about enjoying the supporting actors; aside from Fisher, who plays Jean's best friend, and Frank Whaley, who portrays the prosecuting attorney at Jean's murder trial, the sideline players get stuck with parts almost too tiny to mention. 

Aside from all this negativity, there's still something to enjoy in Mrs. Harris. Nagy does a good job alternating between the brightly-colored world of the '60s when Jean and Herman first met and the dim, gray world of the '80s during Jean's trial. Bening's performance is also worth watching, and that crackerjack credits opener is really something to admire. Unfortunately, Mrs. Harris fails to deliver the cutting-edge, award-winning quality of other HBO films. 

MY RATING: ** (out of ****)

(Released by HBO Home Video; not rated by MPAA.)