Cast and Crew

My Too Cents:

Synopsis:
___Nice guy Andy Safian (Bill Pullman), Dean of Students at a small East Coast girl's college, knows he's lucked out in life's lottery. Andy has problems: restoring his Victorian house is straining his budget to breaking point and a serial rapist/murderer is terrorizing the picture postcard campus. But he's married to the most perfect woman in the world: Tracy (Nicole Kidman) is beautiful, sexy, smart, loving and domestic. Even the intrusion of sleek, arrogant, Dr. Jed Hill (Alec Baldwin) can't spoil things.

Another man might be humiliated to realize he attended high school with the handsome, successful, egotistical Hill, who neither recognizes Andy nor bothers to remember his name after they've become re-acquainted. But upon hearing that Hill is looking for somewhere to live, Andy invites him to rent the third floor of his house, over Tracy's protests. Hill is a predictably bad tenant, given to late night orgies and loud music. Before Andy can muster the spine to ask him to leave, Tracy, who has been suffering abdominal cramps, becomes critically ill. Hill operates, and presents Andy with two pieces of information: Tracy is pregnant, and her ovaries are necrotic. Concerned above all with saving Tracy's life, Andy okays surgery to remove them. But when Tracy recovers, not only is she not grateful, she's devastated by the knowledge that she was, but is no longer, pregnant, and that she'll never have children. She sues Hill for millions and leaves Andy, blaming both men for ruining her life.

Terrible though all this is, it's nothing compared with the web of lies and calculated deception Andy uncovers after he stumbles across a single, puzzling fact that precipitates the unravelling of what's left of his world. During the investigation of the campus murders (the killer, whom Andy is instrumental in catching, turns out to be the janitor), Andy was forced to give a sperm sample, which cleared him as a suspect. Months later, the tough-talking detective in charge (Bebe Neuwirth) tells Andy that it also showed he was sterile. By whom, then, was Tracy pregnant? Andy tracks down Tracy's supposedly dead mother (Anne Bancroft), who reveals that Tracy is an accomplished con woman, then sets out to find the mysterious doctor she was visiting before the incident.

When he does, another surprise awaits: the doctor is Hill, and Hill is Tracy's lover. Andy realizes they cooked up the plot together, and plan to disappear as soon as Tracy is awarded her settlement. The medical emergency was an elaborate fraud, and Andy just a pawn. Enraged, he turns the tables, first pitting them against one another (when the heat is turned up, Tracy kills Hill), then tricking Tracy into revealing herself. She is arrested, and Andy is left to contemplate the ruins of his life.

MALICE revolves around an insurance scam of such breathtaking, gut-twisting (quite literally) audacity that it's almost easier to imagine pulling it off for real than making it work on film. Concocted by two contemporary enthusiasts of the thrillers with twists--Scott Frank (DEAD AGAIN) and Adam Sorkin (A FEW GOOD MEN)--MALICE is, for all its gloss, a mess: simultaneously too complicated and insufficiently complex. (TV Guide)