'MARY REILLY' TURNS TIMID AT THE THRESHOLD OF REVELATION.

Byline: Amy Dawes Daily News Critic

"Mary Reilly" may be the perfect campy horror film for the Prozac nation. This update of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is the tale of a man who is able to transform himself from a seething, lustful, homicidal monster back to a kind, contained and rational person simply by swallowing a chemical.

If only it could be taken in the spirit of that much fun.

But director Stephen Frears and writer Christopher Hampton, who collaborated on "Dangerous Liaisons," along with actors John Malkovich and Glenn Close from that movie, and Julia Roberts from the Hollywood A-list, are up to something much more sophisticated and sexually insinuating here.

They want to plumb the psyche of a young woman scarred by childhood abuse, and show how perversity and innocence do battle in her own timorous soul, just as they do behind the raging, fevered brow of her employer, Dr. Jekyll.

The premise comes from a popular novel by Valerie Martin, which offers the twist of showing the Jekyll and Hyde story entirely through the eyes of a housemaid, Mary Reilly (Roberts), to whom the good but tormented doctor (Malkovich) finds himself drawn.

Like the 1886 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson that inspired "Mary Reilly," the movie is set in the gloomy, moody, highly repressive Edinburgh, Scotland, of the 1880s.

When the story opens, Mary is in the subservient position for which she is humbly grateful - scrubbing the doorstep of the doctor's home. He stoops to inquire about some scars on her wrists and neck, but she seems upset and demurely avoids explaining them.

Later, Mary opens up and confides the horrific story of her childhood abuse by a drunken lout of a father who locked her in a closet and threw rats in to bite her. Pushed by the doctor, Mary also hints at sexual abuse that is even more deeply repressed.

The story is so appalling that Jekyll seems almost aroused by it, sensing a buried darkness in Mary and her complicated relationship with her monstrous father, to which he himself can relate.

"It was as if he carried another person inside of him, and the drinking brought him out," says Mary of her two-sided father.

"You think it was only the drinking," says the doctor, implying that he knows better.

Soon after, the doctor, who disappears nightly into his laboratory, from which his tormented screams can be heard, announces he had made a "great breakthrough" in his work, and he'll soon be introducing his household staff to his new assistant, Mr. Hyde.

Oddly, Mr. Hyde will not require additional meal service, nor a place to sleep. Shockingly, he'll be rooming at a house of ill- repute. (The brothel is run by Glenn Close, in an entertaining turn as a Cruella de Vil-type who meets an untimely demise.)

Mary soon meets this younger, more virile and athletic version of the doctor, who has a mane of rock star hair and, like her father, an odd walk.

Hyde (also played by Malkovich) is blunt, rude, brattish and insinuating, cutting straight to the core of sexual impulses that Mary never dared realize she harbored.

Soon, he's in her bed, poking his snakelike tongue into her ear, but - poof! - this fantasy turns safely into a dream sequence, and the movie is never that daring again.

The film's problem is that it sets the stage for a provocative psychological voyage that it never really takes. It's not that we want to see Mary turn bad - it's just that we want something to happen. Flirting with perversion - being rattled and ruffled by it - is not the same as exploring it. Writer Hampton should know; he took it all the way in the lamentable "Total Eclipse" about the poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, another of his recent screenplays. Then again, it's not as if that movie was any more fun than this.

Mary rarely gets to go anywhere - she's sheltered - and we're stuck seeing the movie from inside her head. For insight, we must rely on the luminous face but rather limited range of Roberts, who occasionally takes a whack at a Scottish or Irish accent, but never really commits to it.

As for Malkovich, he's fey, he's brash, he's complicated and entertaining. But in a role that's been essayed more straightforwardly by John Barrymore, Fredric March and Spencer Tracy, you really can't win. And he doesn't seem to care whether he sounds American or Scottish either.

Ultimately, who knows what this movie is about? It's been reported that the studio wanted more of a straight-ahead Gothic thriller, and Frears battled for this more sophisticated idea, and many cuts and compromises were ultimately made.

One can't be too specific about the ending, which was rumored to be reshot three months after the picture wrapped.But it's fair to say the ending is modern, not entirely convincing, and less brutal and satisfying than the ending in the 1932 movie "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," in which March starred for director Rouben Mamoulian.

THE FACTS

The film: "Mary Reilly" (R; violence, sexuality, child abuse).

The stars: Julia Roberts, John Malkovich, Glenn Close, George Cole, Kathy Staff, Michael Sheen, Bronagh Gallagher.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Stephen Frears. Written by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Valerie Martin. Produced by Ned Tanen, Nancy Graham Tanen, Norma Heyman. Released by TriStar.

Running time: One hour, 58 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Two Stars.

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PHOTO

Photo Mary (Julia Roberts) is subdued by Mr. Hyde (John Malkovich) in "Mary Reilly."