Somehow when Curtis Hanson gets a hold of something as a director he's able to make it work far better than it should (if not all the time then with a good average for him to keep getting work). Case in point, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. He takes material that could, in lesser or just more hack-like hands, be a simple TV movie about a woman scorned badly getting her payback against the family that not-sorta-really did this to her. It's about what happens when a woman loses everything- this being a widow of a doctor-gynecologist who was a creep who took too much pleasure in his work and who killed himself when faced with harassment charges- including her child in a miscarriage. After the woman, Claire Bartel (Annabella Sciorra) has her baby, a new nanny comes around. With her blond hair and cold blue eyes and perfect demeanor and posture, she's practically perfect to come in and take care of her new tot and the little girl sister of the house. What could go wrong here?
The plot Peyton Flanders, nay Mrs. Mott, unravels is ingenious: unravel the family by focusing the bad attention on the mother, make people in the house dislike her, and at some point after getting tons of love from everyone kill her off. It helps as well that she still has her breast milk and, you know, gets the baby hooked up with that. The script by Amanda Silver could slip into cliché at any time... and in ways it actual does, sometimes rather startlingly. She even puts in a supporting character that should be blatant (or back in the 1950's could have been a racist caricature), with mentally challenged Solomon (Ernie Hudson), who knows what's really going on but can't speak up due to how he is, and certainly can't defend himself when Peyton pulls her mind-game crap against him. It should be all win for her, with this happy family.
Characters are drawn out in a believable way. We don't doubt that Peyton can do all of this since she's had time to prepare, like a mastermind constructing an intricate game, pitting sides against one another, a chess-master with an ignorant opponent. And director Curtis Hanson casts his film to a fine tune; this is a group of people that take these characters seriously (Hudson most surprising, as I felt for his character if only because of his performance). We feel the vulnerability that shows little by little from Claire from Sciorra's own ability to show it so well, and De Mornay has some of her best work of her whole career here. Supporting players get their teeth to sink in too: Julianne Moore pops up for a few scenes as a tough career woman but not a bad one, and for her few moments she's kind of stunning, for how little she's given to do.
Oh there are some big set-pieces, and the eventual climactic showdown in the house in a kind of last-ditch effort to get what she wants. But by this point Hanson has not cheapened too much of the drama, at least for the melodrama he's after. This isn't masterpiece theater, it's a tough little thriller in the guise of a suburbia, where underneath the warm front of happy children and happy mentally challenged workers, there's some nastiness that can't be gotten rid of (albeit it can come in handy when confronting the school-yard bully as Peyton does here). Good work all around, surprising even, and something Lifetime movie-makers should watch as a benchmark of high quality, if that means much.
The plot Peyton Flanders, nay Mrs. Mott, unravels is ingenious: unravel the family by focusing the bad attention on the mother, make people in the house dislike her, and at some point after getting tons of love from everyone kill her off. It helps as well that she still has her breast milk and, you know, gets the baby hooked up with that. The script by Amanda Silver could slip into cliché at any time... and in ways it actual does, sometimes rather startlingly. She even puts in a supporting character that should be blatant (or back in the 1950's could have been a racist caricature), with mentally challenged Solomon (Ernie Hudson), who knows what's really going on but can't speak up due to how he is, and certainly can't defend himself when Peyton pulls her mind-game crap against him. It should be all win for her, with this happy family.
Characters are drawn out in a believable way. We don't doubt that Peyton can do all of this since she's had time to prepare, like a mastermind constructing an intricate game, pitting sides against one another, a chess-master with an ignorant opponent. And director Curtis Hanson casts his film to a fine tune; this is a group of people that take these characters seriously (Hudson most surprising, as I felt for his character if only because of his performance). We feel the vulnerability that shows little by little from Claire from Sciorra's own ability to show it so well, and De Mornay has some of her best work of her whole career here. Supporting players get their teeth to sink in too: Julianne Moore pops up for a few scenes as a tough career woman but not a bad one, and for her few moments she's kind of stunning, for how little she's given to do.
Oh there are some big set-pieces, and the eventual climactic showdown in the house in a kind of last-ditch effort to get what she wants. But by this point Hanson has not cheapened too much of the drama, at least for the melodrama he's after. This isn't masterpiece theater, it's a tough little thriller in the guise of a suburbia, where underneath the warm front of happy children and happy mentally challenged workers, there's some nastiness that can't be gotten rid of (albeit it can come in handy when confronting the school-yard bully as Peyton does here). Good work all around, surprising even, and something Lifetime movie-makers should watch as a benchmark of high quality, if that means much.