Being Julia

Synopsis: Julia Lambert (Annette Bening) is feted on the English stage, in a marriage of convenience with her director husband (Jeremy Irons), and tired of acting. That is until she meets a young American (Shaun Evans) and begins a mad affair. All goes well until Tom tires of her and takes up with an aspiring thespian, Avie Crichton (Lucy Punch).

Annette Bening was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as a fictional aging leading lady of 1930’s English theatre. Although she does a good job she was not unfairly pipped by Hilary Swank (as she also had been in 1999 when the latter took home the Best Actress Oscar for Boys Don't Cry over Ms. Bening's turn in American Beauty).

István Szabó's latest effort is a good example of “quality” cinema but its problem is that the quality is largely divorced from a convincing raison d’être. Its credentials are very solid. Based on a novella, 'Theatre', by W. Somerset Maugham, it was adapted for the screen by Ronnie Harwood, an English playwright and screenwriter whose finest hour was, for me, The Dresser although most people will know of his work from Polanski’s 2002 Oscar-winner, The Pianist.  Szabó is best known for Mephisto which also dealt with the world of the stage, that time in Nazi Germany, and which won the 1981 Best Foreign Film Oscar. So these men know theatre and know about filmic representations of it (including, one assumes, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve,1950, with which this film, although a much less-gifted relation, has been compared by various reviewers).

As a re-creation of the glamorous lives of late 1930s West End theatre people and their romping in the Home Counties, Being Julia is a treat. Production-wise I kept recalling last year's Cole Porter bio-pic De-Lovely, which was largely devoted to the same Art Deco era (Porter's music is featured here along with many other popular songs of the period). Szabó uses a large Hungarian contingent of technical crew with whom he has no doubt worked before and who are well-skilled with this kind of historical similitude. All this is perfect Noel Coward-ish material and much of Harwood’s dialogue and characterisations (that of Jeremy Irons most notably) are reminiscent of The Master’s mannered style. The problem is that there is an attempt, as the film’s title suggests, to give proceedings a more substantial, ontological spin. That is, to depart from Coward’s somewhat stereotypical comedies of manners and in a more contemporary way, to enter into Julia’s joys and sorrows, nay her actor’s soul. And so, enter Bening's Oscar-nominated performance.

Whilst it is a commonplace to describe actors as people who are unable to distinguish their self from their various stage personae, from a structural viewpoint the film-maker exploring this topic needs to be able to give the audience the ability to do so (the presence of the ghost of Julia's acting mentor, played by Michael Gambon is a nice touch in this respect). Although both Harwood and Szabó managed this kind of subject so well in their above-cited films, here they do not, so one cannot blame Ms. Bening for the outcome. When the script pushes her into an affair with an ill-defined and annoyingly smug but callow young American she obliges, feigning girlish enthusiasm, but in no way convincing us of the genuine romantic upheaval which has supposedly transpired. In short, much of the film is a contrived progression into the woman-spurned situation which is the pretext for the final section of the story.

If one has spent much of the time wondering what this picturesque but ho-hum development of events is all about, this latter part of the film, in which Bening’s Julia ceases to be the writer’s and director’s puppet and behaves more consistently with her character, is much more engaging. This is particularly so for its effective closure, which is staged as part of a play involving Julia and her rival for Tom’s affections and, more importantly, the limelight. It is, to use an apt word, delicious, written and played with the verve that is so insistently lacking in what has gone before. Whether that justifies the long wait to that point will depend upon your mood.

 

 

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