1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 20: Mary Reilly
A respected physician concocts a drug that, for a few hours at a time, allows him to assume the appearance of another man. So disguised, he commits heinous crimes. He avoids detection by taking a drug that restores his original appearance. After several of these transformations, however, the persona of the criminal comes to dominate that of the physician.
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A myth, in the technical sense of C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, is a story or situation that, even in barest outline, affects an audience; that is, a myth creates an effect no matter whether its telling has literary merit. (Even so, Lewis says, a person capable of being affected by myth seems, invariably, to have literary sensitivity. Lewis offers this as an observation about audiences, not as a part of myth’s definition.)
Imagine, for example, a person who has never learned the story of Jekyll and Hyde. If my artless summary at the beginning of this entry evokes the right sort of response in such a person – specifically, a response that is “grave” (p. 44) and “aweful” (p. 48) – then that story has “mythical quality” (p. 42). (Lewis himself names the Jekyll and Hyde story as an example of modern myth.)
To further explain how myth is “extra-literary,” Lewis says that one of myth’s defining characteristics is that “those who have got at the same myth through Natalis Comes, Lemprière, Kingsley, Hawthorne, Robert Graves, or Roger Green have a mythical experience in common” (p. 43).
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In Mary Reilly, we get a retelling of the Jekyll and Hyde myth – one that doesn’t contain precisely the same characters and episodes of Stevenson’s novella but nonetheless conforms to the essential summary given above. The interesting question, so far as Lewis’s theory of myth goes, is whether the same mythical experience is had in common by those who approach the myth through Stevenson (or, for that matter, through my bare summary) and those who approach it through the movie.
For there is a difference. The movie might have been called Sympathy for Dr Jekyll. The main project of Mary Reilly is to give the audience a perspective from which to sympathize with Jekyll – and even, to some extent, with Hyde. This is achieved through the character of Mary, one of the housemaids in Jekyll’s employ.
The movie begins with Jekyll’s fascination with Mary. As Roger Ebert describes it:
If, as the myth suggests, people are conflicted between public good and private evil, then this telling of it shows why they might still reach out to others for understanding, and why, in so doing, they impose demands (for Jekyll and Hyde impose demands on Mary). Mary Reilly explores these impulses more carefully than other tellings of the Jekyll and Hyde tale, and it does so from the perspective of one from whom understanding is demanded. This is what distinguishes it from other versions. It doesn’t allow the horror to be kept at arm’s length.
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Lewis would say that this cinematic version breaks one of his other rules about myths, which is that “human sympathy is at a minimum” (p. 44). Well, then: are stories mythical only in bare outline? Do they cease to be mythical once the details are filled in? Is myth like color, which washes out the more closely you peer under a microscope?
I don’t know how Lewis would answer. I do think, however, that the story as told in Mary Reilly loses none of its gravity and “awefulness” though it evokes sympathy. Perhaps Lewis ought to retract his no-sympathy rule.
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Ebert describes how most of the action of Mary Reilly occurs on “a few vast yet claustrophobic sets”:
But, as with any great myth, it isn’t the details that matter. Mary Reilly takes a good story and makes us think of it differently by changing the perspective from which it comes to us.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
A myth, in the technical sense of C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, is a story or situation that, even in barest outline, affects an audience; that is, a myth creates an effect no matter whether its telling has literary merit. (Even so, Lewis says, a person capable of being affected by myth seems, invariably, to have literary sensitivity. Lewis offers this as an observation about audiences, not as a part of myth’s definition.)
Imagine, for example, a person who has never learned the story of Jekyll and Hyde. If my artless summary at the beginning of this entry evokes the right sort of response in such a person – specifically, a response that is “grave” (p. 44) and “aweful” (p. 48) – then that story has “mythical quality” (p. 42). (Lewis himself names the Jekyll and Hyde story as an example of modern myth.)
To further explain how myth is “extra-literary,” Lewis says that one of myth’s defining characteristics is that “those who have got at the same myth through Natalis Comes, Lemprière, Kingsley, Hawthorne, Robert Graves, or Roger Green have a mythical experience in common” (p. 43).
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
In Mary Reilly, we get a retelling of the Jekyll and Hyde myth – one that doesn’t contain precisely the same characters and episodes of Stevenson’s novella but nonetheless conforms to the essential summary given above. The interesting question, so far as Lewis’s theory of myth goes, is whether the same mythical experience is had in common by those who approach the myth through Stevenson (or, for that matter, through my bare summary) and those who approach it through the movie.
For there is a difference. The movie might have been called Sympathy for Dr Jekyll. The main project of Mary Reilly is to give the audience a perspective from which to sympathize with Jekyll – and even, to some extent, with Hyde. This is achieved through the character of Mary, one of the housemaids in Jekyll’s employ.
The movie begins with Jekyll’s fascination with Mary. As Roger Ebert describes it:
Why is Jekyll drawn to her? Because of her scars. He asks her about them, and finally she reveals that she was beaten as a child, and locked in a closet with rats. And yet she refuses to say she hates her father for his treatment of her. This powerfully attracts Jekyll, who already feels that the Hyde side of his nature is beyond human acceptance. If Mary cannot hate her father, perhaps she cannot hate Jekyll and his secret; that would make her the only human soul with sympathy for the suffering doctor.The movie shows Mary drawing closer to Jekyll even as his other acquaintances recoil further from his increasing strangeness. It might have been tempting to suggest some weirdness in Mary, so that she and Jekyll, or she and Hyde, could be kindred spirits. But the movie doesn’t do this. Mary has no attraction to suffering as such. But she is a decent person who responds to others’ needs, even as Jekyll’s and Hyde’s needs are revealed to be convoluted and repulsive.
If, as the myth suggests, people are conflicted between public good and private evil, then this telling of it shows why they might still reach out to others for understanding, and why, in so doing, they impose demands (for Jekyll and Hyde impose demands on Mary). Mary Reilly explores these impulses more carefully than other tellings of the Jekyll and Hyde tale, and it does so from the perspective of one from whom understanding is demanded. This is what distinguishes it from other versions. It doesn’t allow the horror to be kept at arm’s length.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Lewis would say that this cinematic version breaks one of his other rules about myths, which is that “human sympathy is at a minimum” (p. 44). Well, then: are stories mythical only in bare outline? Do they cease to be mythical once the details are filled in? Is myth like color, which washes out the more closely you peer under a microscope?
I don’t know how Lewis would answer. I do think, however, that the story as told in Mary Reilly loses none of its gravity and “awefulness” though it evokes sympathy. Perhaps Lewis ought to retract his no-sympathy rule.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Ebert describes how most of the action of Mary Reilly occurs on “a few vast yet claustrophobic sets”:
We see Jekyll’s library, filled with books to intimidate the uneducated housemaid. His operating theater, a Victorian monstrosity with tiers of seats for observers, looking down into the circles of hell. His laboratory, behind the house, usually locked, reached by a strange walkway suspended from chains. His bedroom, which one day is covered with blood, even on the ceiling.The set design is, indeed, unsettling; otherwise, this is far from the most accomplished movie I’ve reviewed. Julia Roberts’s performance as Mary is touching and believable insofar as the viewer is able to suspend disbelief about her inauthentic Irish accent. John Malkovich, who plays both Jekyll and Hyde, also speaks like a non-native, but this is less noticeable because he exudes oddness in everything he does. I’m not sure whether having an oddball play Jekyll is the best choice; the division between Jekyll and Hyde might have been starker if Jekyll had been more bland, at least at the beginning.
But, as with any great myth, it isn’t the details that matter. Mary Reilly takes a good story and makes us think of it differently by changing the perspective from which it comes to us.