08/02/2001

By PHILIP WUNTCH Movie Critic / The Dallas Morning News

Even the most serious cineastes fall prey to the forbidden fruit of melodrama. Martin Scorsese, for example, admits to a long-term affair with Duel in the Sun.

MGM Studios Angelina Jolie plays a wicked wife in Original Sin.

Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas play Original Sin's combative lovers. He's Luis Vargas, wealthy owner of a coffee plantation in turn-of-last-century Cuba. A pragmatic man, he sends off for a mail-order bride. But one look at Julia Russell (Ms. Jolie) shatters all pragmatism. He becomes obsessed with her, which, the viewer quickly learns, is dangerous. His new bride is a woman with a past, the extent of which should never be underestimated. The future holds abandonment, deception and murder most foul.

Despite their expertise at posing provocatively in various states of disarray, Mr. Banderas and Ms. Jolie are surprisingly poor choices for the leads. Mr. Banderas' shameless self-absorption makes it difficult to accept him as an enslaved male. Preening narcissism somehow deflates the idea of obsessive, masochistic love.

Even in Girl, Interrupted and the cable movie Gia, Ms. Jolie had difficulty delivering a sustained performance. She's terrific at volatile acting sketches, and for a while that's all the role of Julia requires. But for the plot's bizarre twists to obtain credibility, her character must reveal some emotional symmetry, which is outside the boundaries of Ms. Jolie's primal, raw talent.

Wandering through the film is Thomas Jane, as a private investigator who seems a variation of Peter Sellers' Quilty in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita . Like every other component of Original Sin, Mr. Jane is guilty of self-awareness, and his character never links the vignettes together as intended.

But director/screenwriter Michael Cristofer must bear Original Sin's largest stigma. Mr. Cristofer won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for The Shadow Box, a stirring examination of terminally ill patients. Original Sin's screenplay is hardly the stuff of Pulitzers, and his heavy-handed direction sabotages any "guilty pleasure" status. Early in the film, whenever Mr. Banderas reflects on his happy marriage to Ms. Jolie, the camera cuts to a squawking bird or a braying donkey. Compared with the rest of the film, this is Mr. Cristofer at his most understated.

Besides, as the opulent movie stumbles to its conclusion, the audience will provide all the squawking and braying.

Original Sin

D-

Starring Antonio Banderas, Angelina Jolie and Thomas Jane. Directed by Michael Cristofer. Rated R (sex, violence, language, nudity). In wide release. 116 min.