Being Julia

Being Julia (2004) directed by István Szabo has an all star cast consisting of Annette Benning as the ageing theatre star Julia, her manager/husband Michael (Jeremy Irons) and she is sort of haunted by the ghost of her first director Jimmie Langton (Michael Gambon). The movie is based on the W. Sommerset Maugham novel “Theatre” and if there is one thing Maugham is really good at it is depicting the life style of the rich, indolent and frivolous.

Set in a gorgeous 1930’s London theatre world the lead actress Julia is coming to an age when she can no longer play perky 25 blond ditzes and she is not old enough to play the mother/crone/hag/queen. She takes a young lover, Tom (Shaun Evans), to break the tedium and rejuvenate herself, and in part it works. There is no angst here about infidelity or anything like that, everyone agrees it is marriage of convenience and as long as nothing happens that can break up that happy arangement, everything is fine.

Julia is a drama queen – in a literal sense. The ghost of her first director sometimes argues with her that only the theatre is real, everything else is incidental. And she seems to agree with him, especially when her young lover is revealed as an opportunist, gold digger and general cad. The problem with seeing all the world as a stage and evenryone around you as a player is that nothing ever really reaches beyond surface values. You are only as good as your last performance and even if the audience loves Julia that kind of love is famously fickle. We get to see how she carries her personal turmoil with her to her performance on stage, which is typical 1930’s stage acting, something actors can’t get away with today – not after method acting and realism took over.

The young man, Tom, finds himself a younger, blonder wanna-be actress to bed and manages to talk Julia into getting her a part in the new play about to go on. Julia hides her feelings, agrees and takes the backseat only to completely upstage the poor ingenue on opening night. It is a petty, cruel and complete revenge.

Annette Benning is brilliant in this role. She giggles, cries, loves and hams it up like nobody’s business. A real tour de force. Jeremy Irons is brilliant as her ageing, vain husband and Michael Gambon is at his best… as usual. The younger actors and actresses are aptly beautiful and good at what they do, despite being completely upstaged. Sumptuous costumes, beautiful sets … everything is surface in that indulgent way that this kind of period film can get away with.

The only problem is that it is all surface. You never get the sense that any of Julia’s emotions are real in any important way. I don’t mind. Surface about surface with a lovely veneer and lots of eyecandy. Only occasionally do we get a glimpse of something that could be called real feeling – which Julia’s son calls her on as well. But it is an artificial world we are seeing and it never makes the claim to wish to depict any kind of actual reality. And that makes it one of those movies you watch and like and think nice things of… and then promptly forget the plot, the idea behind it and what it was all about. You will remember the actors and actresses, the performance, and the look of the thing, though.

Mule