Malice (1993)

The 1993 neo-noir Malice arrives with a premise that could sustain a seminar in medical ethics and instead sustains a game of three-card monte. Andy and Tracy Safian want a child. A surgeon named Jed Hill rents their third floor, botches an operation, and leaves Tracy sterile. A malpractice suit follows, then a settlement, then the slow revelation that the whole catastrophe was a con engineered by Tracy and Jed for the money. Harold Becker directs with a straight face and a fondness for red herrings. The film's only real interest is the mechanism of the swindle.

The women's college where Andy serves as associate dean comes equipped with a serial rapist, a subplot Roger Ebert correctly identified as atmosphere rather than narrative. Nobody in this Massachusetts town has a politics. Nobody carries a grievance larger than a settlement figure. Jed's deposition outburst, in which he declares himself God because he can close a chest cavity, plays as the vanity of one arrogant man, not a thesis about medicine, insurance, or the institutions that underwrite both. Nicole Kidman's Tracy is a femme fatale in the classical mode, ruthless and unrepentant, and the film never asks us to pity her or to indict the world that produced her. Anne Bancroft appears for a single scene as an alcoholic mother and walks off with it.

Malice opened at number one and took $61.6 million worldwide against a $20 million budget, which tells us something about 1993 appetites. Aaron Sorkin has since called the whole enterprise a mess. The FBI, or at least a magazine summarizing the FBI, reportedly counts Jed Hill among cinema's more accurate psychopaths. That is the legacy: a well-tailored, hollow, entirely apolitical thriller that lectures nobody about anything and expects nothing from its audience beyond a tolerance for coincidence. Refreshing, in its way. Also exhausting.