Body of Evidence

Rating

Director

Uli Edel

Screenplay

Brad Mirman

Length

1h 39m

Starring

Madonna, Michael Frost, Joe Mantegna, Charles Hallahan, Mark Rolston, Richard Riehle, Ann Archer, Willem Dafoe, Julianne Moore, Aaron Corcoran

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
A beautiful woman can be a dangerous weapon. This is the idea behind Body of Evidence.

Madonna stars as Rebecca Carlson, a sexually independent gallery owner who has a penchant for sadomasochistic sex. Her relationship with an elderly man, Andrew Marsh (Michael Forest), who has a heart problem, causes a huge uproar. Upon his death by cocaine poisoning and his will leaving $8 million to Carlson, she becomes the first suspect and must find a lawyer who can prove her innocent. She selects Frank Dulaney (Willem Dafoe), a husband and father who has never experimented with non-standard sex and finds himself immediately attracted to the sultry siren.

Anne Archer plays Marsh’s long-time secretar,y who immediately fingers Carlson as the culprit because of her own personal reasons. Joe Mantegna is Robert Garrett, an experienced homicide detective and lawyer who attempts to convince a jury of Carlson’s guilt while being opposed skilfully by Dulaney. The large majority of the film takes place in the courtroom, but due to the film’s numerous sexual encounters, we often get to leave the judicial environment for a brief respite.

Director Uli Edel doesn’t control his actors very well. Nor does he bring any depth to the screenplay by Brad Birman. Madonna is certainly the weakest link of the cast, despite her future bravura performance in Evita. Here, we see Madonna only as a sex symbol into kinky sex. We don’t see a human with real emotions. The screenplay may call for this, but for her character to succeed, she needs to have more profundity. Dafoe is similarly weak but as opposed to his co-star, Dafoe at least attempts to give his character a depth uncharacteristic to the film.

The best performances are those from Frank Langella, who plays another of Carlson’s heart-troubled ex-lovers, and Archer. Both give wholly-developed performances that, despite their short screen time, are riveting. Other than these, the rest of the cast give average performances, including Mantegna, Charles Hallahan as Dr. McCurdy, whose testimony begins to unravel Carlson’s case, and the sadly disappointing Julianne Moore, who plays Dulaney’s wife.

Body of Evidence is a pale husk of a film. It pretends to preach the values of accepting others even though they are unorthodox in how they live their lives. The movie starts burning itself out as it goes along, attempting to force the audience to feel pity for all of its characters, but by the end, all that’s left are the ashes and nowhere is there a phoenix to rise from them.

Review Written

July 7, 2003