Before and After.

Had Before and After been a good movie, it would have been a greater Jekyll-and-Hyde study than Mary Reilly. or, at least, it would have been more immediately disturbing, for its first half suggests that we're watching a study of buried evil, or at least buried rage that has sprung into murderous action and left an adolescent girl dead at the hands of her sixteen-year-old boyfriend.

But if scriptwriter Ted Tally had had a gun held to his head and been ordered to expunge every bit of true drama from his screenplay, he couldn't have done a more thorough job of dramaturgical castration than he's accomplished here. After teasing us for an hour with the mystery of the teen-aged killer's nature, the film then reveals that there's been no murder at all, just an unfortunate and--as staged--totally preposterous accident. Whatever drama the second hour could produce must come from the psychological squirming of the father who has destroyed evidence in a misguided attempt to protect his child and now must face the consequences in and out of court. The situation could have produced some good, tense moments. There are few better ways of hooking an audience than by watching basically decent folks caught through their own frailties in the impersonal toils of the law (think of The Fallen Idol). But the two scenes needed to bring this situation to its climax--the court testimonies of each of the parents--aren't in the movie. Instead, each of the parents, after his or her testimony, comes running out of the courtroom and reports on what just happened. Less is more, a philosopher of architecture once told us. But nothing is nothing. Still, there is one kind of abundance here, for director Barbet Schroeder never skimps on visual cliches.

And how he has betrayed his actors! I won't discuss the juvenile players because I don't want to be charged with child-actor abuse. As the father, Liam Neeson is allowed to merely sketch his character as if warming up for a real performance in his next movie. But it is Meryl Streep who has really been brought down by this wretched movie. There are close-ups of her here, moisteyed and blinking, that suggest a high school senior's idea of "emotional" acting. And did I hallucinate during the film's one bedroom scene or did Streep really tug her skirt down demurely over her knees as Neeson launched his hulk onto her, as if to tell us that, even during sex, she is every inch a lady? Barbet Schroeder has committed the unforgivable. He has taken the great Meryl Streep--so mysteriously sensual in Sophie's Choice, so earthy in A Cry in the Dark--and turned her into a dear, sweet, wee woman. The Spring Byington of the nineties.