Alec Baldwin’s career has been on a rocky road following the fatal shooting accident on the set of Rust in 2021. Baldwin’s legal battles have consumed most of his time as he’s only been able to be in less than stellar movies. But in the early 1990s, he was on fire as the next biggest actor. His one-scene role in Glengarry Glen Ross became iconic with the line, “Coffee is for closers.”
Writer David Mamet had to insert the scene he wrote solely for the movie adaptation into the play as people were upset it was missing when they saw it on the stage years after the movie was released in 1992. Yes, Baldwin can be difficult at times but when you’re raised Irish Catholic among many brothers in Long Island, New York, you’re not exactly not going to be Minnesota nice.
That makes his role as Dr. Jed Hill in the thriller Malice so perfect. Jed is the newest hot surgeon at the hospital in a Massachusetts town that is dealing with a serial rapist. Jed manages to save the life of the recent victim, a female student at the nearby college. This puts him in touch with Andy Safian (Bill Pullman), an associate dean at the college. Jed and Andy went to the same school together growing up even though they didn’t hang out. But they seem to start a friendship now that they reconnected.
Andy and his recently married wife, Tracy (Nicole Kidman), have recently purchased a Victorian house but are struggling financially. As chance would have it, Jed needs a place to stay and they have a third-floor available for him to rent. Yes, it does seem like too much of a coincidence. It works mostly because Baldwin lays on the sly side he did in movies like Miami Blues and She’s Having a Baby. You know he’s up to something but you love to see the way he pulls it off. Also, Pullman during this era had that “Aw-shucks!” gullibility that made him so likeable in Casper and While You Were Sleeping.
Of course, Tracy isn’t too keen on having Jed stay there, especially after he brings a hot nurse Tanya (Deborah Farentino) home and they have loud sex late one night. But is Tracy right to be cautious of Jed? Earlier in the movie he berates another doctor, Matthew Robertson (David Bowe), who questions his actions during the operating room and threatens violence. Could Jed be the serial rapists?
It becomes quite obvious, especially now in 2025, what is going on and we can tell what is happening during a certain scene that I won’t mention. Malice is co-written by Aaron Sorkin and Scott Frank and directed by Harold Becker. It’s a movie that’s more about twisting what we’ve come to expect in stereotypes and cliches in movies only to take the plot down a different path in the second half. Other movies released years later like The Game and The Pledge played on our expectations only to flip the script on us before we even realized it.
When a young student, Paula Bell (Gwyneth Paltrow), is attacked and murdered at her house, it points to Andy as a suspect when he is the one who finds the body. Even the local police detective Dana Harris (Bebe Neuwirth) who he has a good working relationship with, questions him. I know people throw out the word Hitchcockian too often when it comes to these movies but like Psycho we’re led to believe the movie is going to go one way then a third in, it all changes.
Hitchcock also wasn’t a fan of gunplay and gun violence and used it sparingly or itself as a joke as with the climax of North by Northwest. I think there’s only one scene where someone shoots a gun and the ending here makes use of things that you might have thought were just throwaway props earlier. This is a movie about people who think they’re smarter than they actually but realize there’s no such thing as a perfect crime because there’s always going to be something people don’t anticipate.
The filmmakers were so concerned about the movie’s twists and turns, it was reportedly hard for them to cut a trailer that didn’t give away too much. Yet it worked mostly for a bit of dialogue Baldwin delivers as he defends his “God complex” as people often will pray for their loved ones while in surgery. “I am God,” he says. Baldwin’s cockiness and arrogance both on and off screen is what makes his character here work so well.
The movie includes a supporting cast of George C. Scott as Martin Kessler, Jed’s former teacher and supervisor, Anne Bancroft as a boozing old woman who has a secret, and Peter Gallagher as Dennis Riley, a lawyer for Tracy who Andy suspects is more than just a lawyer. Incidentally, both Pullman and Gallagher would go on to play brothers in While You Were Sleeping.
The movie got mixed reviews when it came out but it was a modest box office earning $61 million worldwide on a $20 million budget. I agree there are plot holes. How can Jed be a serial rapist if he’s just new in town? And doctors make a lot of money, so wouldn’t he at least rent a house of his own? Also, Scott and Bancroft seem to function more as glorified cameos with some speculation Bancroft’s sole scene was Oscar bait.
But the best part of the movie is the performance by Kidman. At the time of the movie’s opening, she was still known as Mrs. Tom Cruise. And her roles in movies like Billy Bathgate, Days of Thunder and Far and Away hadn’t really put her on the A-list. Here she manages to spread her wings a little in a different type of role. She would definitely show more of this side in her lead performance in To Die For.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 