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At thirteen years old, Doris Duke became one of the wealthiest woman in the world when her father, tobacco magnate James Buchanan Duke, died, leaving her $100 million dollars (over a billion dollars today). This was 1925.

HBO’s Bernard and Doris focuses on the end of Doris Duke’s life, when a man named Bernard Lafferty entered her employ as a butler, one of her many faceless staff members. Lafferty, a recovering alcoholic and ex-butler to the likes of Peggy Lee and Elizabeth Taylor, immediately becomes enmeshed in her lavish lifestyle, artistic temperament and diva like needs.

What is known is this: Bernard Lafferty was barely literate, a drunk, and by the time Duke died, the executor of her 1.3 billion dollar estate. The film, directed by Bob Balaban (a Seinfeld alum, Balaban has acted in films like Lady in the Water, Gosford Park, Capote, Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman, and has directed a handful of small projects) fictionalizes the relationship between the butler and the billionaire. It attempts to put forth a rose-colored idea of exactly what transpired between the two mismatched people that led to Bernard’s financial windfall upon her death. It is not a new topic; in 1999, Lauren Bacall and Richard Chamberlain tackled the subject in a more salacious manner in the film Too Rich: The Not-So-Secret Life of Doris Duke.

Bernard and Doris is, in three words, dull, dull, dull. Doris Duke led an amazing life, and though the film tries to capture her diverse interests, many philanthropic contributions and flamboyant beliefs, what it ends up as is a constant sequence of polite back and forth notes detailing the upkeep of her Newport estate and matters of the weather. For a woman who was the first competitive female surfer and married to a playboy whose member was so legendary that pepper grinders in restaurants everywhere were nicknamed after it, she comes off as a lonely drunk who seduces the help and takes random, agenda-less trips around the world.

Doris Duke’s life was a wealth of interesting events, and yet the movie renders her bland and completely void of significance. It is almost as if the filmmakers tried to bland down her life. Susan Sarandon, who plays Duke, does possess some on screen charisma, but not nearly as much as we’ve come to expect from her. Ralph Fiennes is the butler Lafferty, and other than adequately convince us that Lafferty is gay and look horrific in drag, he does nothing for the film (although in one scene, Fiennes falls flat on his face and Sarandon utters a surprised curse that genuinely seems like she was startled by the rigid violence of his fall. That moment alone stands out as mildly amusing). 

Think it can’t be as bad as that? Think again. During my first attempt at watching the film I was distracted by a vague need to check my email. I promptly forgot about the movie for a solid week, and by the time I got back around to it, I found that it had made absolutely no impression on me whatsoever, and had to start all over again.

The DVD has exactly two extras: a commentary track and a featurette that amounts to snippets of junket footage illustrating how little research Balaban did in preparing to direct. He vaguely knows a few headlines relating to Duke’s life (not hard, as the opening sequence is a collection of articles about her) and struggles to remember random factoids that the film has just presented us with. Perhaps he was so bored by his own film that his retention of it was, at best, marginally better than mine.

In summary, if you thinking of watching this movie, don’t. Bernard and Doris is so boring that Ralph Fiennes in an 80’s ball gown and blue eye shadow is not enough to keep Sarandon from phoning in her performance, so the chances that you’ll fare better are pretty freaking slim.

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