If you rent The People vs. Jean Harris, you're in for a long haul. This two-and-a-half hour tv movie feels like five hours - which is realistic in one aspect. Anyone who's had jury duty knows that most trials aren't as exciting and fast-paced as the movies will have you believe. There are long-winded testimonials, lots of technical questions, and details that seem to have nothing to do with the case. However, George Lefferts's teleplay should have been severely edited. He drew from the actual court transcripts, but if he didn't want his audience to fall asleep or change the channel, he didn't do his job very well.
Ellen Burstyn's performance was shockingly blasé. Her character was charged with the second-degree murder of the man she was deeply in love with, and she acted like she was just taken off the street and asked to describe her latest trip to the grocery store. If I had a nickel for how many times she said, "and then," I would have been able to buy a car by the time the movie was over. She couldn't stop talking, even when asked to by the judge. She smiled, joked with the jury, and described the most irrelevant, mundane details, resulting in a very long movie. It was so irritating, I highly recommend fast-forwarding large swaths. The end summation will fill you in on anything you missed.
In addition to being horrendously irritating, I also found Ellen unlikable and impossible to root for. Her defense attorney, Martin Balsam (based on his track record in the movies, he should give up the law) bases the case on an accidental struggle with the gun. Instead of doing a tap dance or a marionette number like Richard Gere did in Chicago while singing "They Both Reached for the Gun", he merely lets his client talk and talk and talk and talk on the stand about every single detail. Where she walked, how many steps she took, which bathroom she used, what she was thinking when she washed her hands at the sink. . . Anyway, Ellen claims that she had no intention of shooting her lover when she drove to his house in the middle of the night - then why did she have a gun in her purse? Because she apparently was so depressed she wanted to kill herself and wanted to talk to him in person before she did it - then why didn't she talk to him, leave his house, and kill herself in private? Because she was so depressed, she just wanted to die - then after the first shot was fired was lodged in her lover's hand, why didn't she realize her aim was bad and she should leave before things get worse?
Now she has me doing it: using "then" to string together long sentences! Seriously, folks, if you want any chance of ever wanting to watch Ellen Burstyn in another movie, don't watch her in this. I was actively rooting for Peter Coyote to win the case of the prosecution. I have one more question: if she wanted to die so badly (which is the basis of her defense), why bother pleading innocent? Why is she not plagued with such guilt over killing the man she loved that, in combination with her depression, she welcomes the electric chair? I guess those are two questions; once again, Ellen's long-windedness must be catching.
