In this movie Archer plays the dead guy's weepy secretary. She's like the Anne Archer character in "Fatal Attraction," the keeper of the nuclear family, she who stands by her man. Good women, married ones who know their place - not on top - are represented by Julianne Moore, a gorgeous redhead who plays Dafoe's wife. The latter, represented by a doddering Frank Langella, slinks out of the courtroom in shame after admitting that he took up men after surviving an affair with the defendant. And Madonna, who sucked God's toes in her video "Like a Prayer," and Dafoe, who played the man himself in "The Last Temptation of Christ," seem perversely well suited to what is at its core a fundamentalist indictment of alternative sexual practices.īrad Mirman, who wrote this hash of "Presumed Innocent," "Basic Instinct" and "9 1/2 Weeks," betrays a true 1950s mind-set when it comes to both the sexually aggressive woman and homosexual man. The characters, for all their sacrilege, seem to be stuck with the tenets learned in Sunday school. She gets the upper hand in the ensuing clash of wills, but the director, German-born and Jesuit-trained Uli Edel ("Last Exit to Brooklyn"), makes sure she gets hers in the end, if you know what I mean. Since Dafoe's been enjoying her painful ministrations himself lately, he doubtless worries that his outspoken client will spill the beans about their increasingly kinky affair. Naturally her attorney had urged her not to take the stand, but she was determined to make the jury understand that her love for Andrew - who gave her handcuffs for Valentine's Day - was different, but not dirty. "Andrew used to say, 'Why watch strangers when you can watch friends,' " recalls the accused in tearful testimony she hopes will sway the prudish jurors. She's on trial for the murder of a wealthy heart patient who dies in the saddle - shoot, he was probably even wearing spurs - while watching a videotape of an earlier performance.
The film, which might as well be an adaptation of her "Sex" book, is a bland, utterly silly, curiously provincial courtroom drama that pits Madonna's dominatrix against Willem Dafoe's strait-laced attorney. Actually, even they expect saucier fare than Madonna serves up in her new movie "Body of Evidence."
Madonna is a case of arrested development if ever there was one the brittle bottle blonde's continued status as the Andy Warhol of sex depends solely on how long her naked egoism remains of interest to anybody but dirty old men. Madonna, that pop tart, likes nothing better than a game of "if you'll show me yours, then I'll show you mine." On second thought, forget about yours.
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