BEING JULIA
Directed by Istvan Szabo
In theatres
(***)
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Written By: John H. Foote
The Opening Night Gala Presentation at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Being Julia was marred with late coming actors as Warren Beatty worked the line outside Roy Thomson Hall and audio troubles plagued the film. I saw the film again recently at a press screening free of audio issues.

Anchored by a brilliant, luminous performance from Annette Bening in the central role, Being Julia is an often hysterical account of a woman’s new found verve for life and love and her method of exacting a cruel and vicious revenge. Watching Bening one is reminded of the work of the great Bette Davis in All About Eve (1950), as we see an actress threatened with the possibility of aging and losing the great roles to younger actresses. Underneath the smiling veneer is a cunning woman with a penchant for nastiness when cornered.

Without Bening the film is just another ordinary study of the theatre, far less a film than The Dresser (1984), written by the same screenwriter, Oscar winner Ron Harwood, who took home the Oscar for his script for The Pianist (2002). Harwood’s awareness and accuracy in depicting the world of the theatre and the characters that inhabit that world is spot on, if a tad predictable.

Bening is Julia, a famous British actress who dominates London’s theatre scene. Bored by her life and everything in it, she enters into an affair with a much younger man, an adoring young American who idolizes her. Feeling rejuvenated with the affair, Julia laughs again, but latches n to the young man with her claws and claims him as her own, something that does not sit well with him. He pursues another young woman and actually insists that Julia see to it the younger woman land a job in a play with Julia. Seeing her chance for revenge, Julia does indeed help the actress, with the full intent of getting even.

And get even she does.

In what might become a famous opening night nightmare, Julia takes to the stage and departs from the rehearsed script and makes the story very much her own. Sharing the stage with the younger actress, now the lover of her ex-lover, she humiliates the younger girl, all the while strengthening her grip on her standing within the London theatre community and earning a standing ovation, even from her husband, a scheming producer who manages her career and her life. Bening dominates every frame of the film in a performance full of life and laughter.

An actress of startling sexuality, Bening has been superb in the past in films such as Valmont (989), The Grifters (1990), Richard III (1995) and best of all in American Beauty (1999). If there is an actress one might deem as under appreciated in the film industry it is most certainly Annette Bening. Her range is extraordinary, her screen presence often luminous, but still she possesses the gift to get down and dirty in her characterizations, as she did as the grasping and vicious little schemer in The Grifters (1990). Here as Julia, she has no need to be grasping as she has everything she wants, except genuine happiness which she finds in the compliments and bed of her young suitor. What angers her is when she is rebuffed and replaced by a younger woman in both her career and her life, which she sees as running parallel. You do not separate the artist from the person, they are one person and Julia reminds everyone of that fact on opening night when she destroys her competition and causes quite a sensation among those watching the play unfold.

Bening has been denied an Academy Award before, but I do not think there is a way she will be denied for her performance here. It is rich in depth and in portraying a diva she has the courage to show to us all of that diva’s flaws and weaknesses before she unleashes her claws and goes to war, as we know she will.

Bening is in a word, astounding.

The rest of the cast are fine, however they are dwarfed whenever on screen with Bening including Jeremy Irons as her producer husband. Though the actors acquit themselves well enough, they are given roles that are a shade under written and lacking the charisma given the leading lady.

Szabo has never helmed a comedy before, preferring heavy drama usually tinged with politics, but here he seems perfectly at home in the manner Preston Sturges was with this style of comedy.

While the film does quite scale the heights of Bening, it is an enjoyable romp worth a look largely for what I believe will be an Oscar winning performance.







© Copyright 2004 Hollywood North Magazine Inc.