Till now, Fred Zinnerman's "Julia" was for me that film that earned Vanessa Redgrave that very Oscar that inspired the infamous speech where the use of two specific words made the audience gasp in horror... and prompted Paddy Chayefsky to retort with the sharpness of tone he'd made a reputation of.
I'm mentioning this incident because it preceded my viewing for at least one decade and it was so prevalent in my memory that I kept looking for signs of subversions within Redgrave's character or performance... surely a role that ignited such a fire had to be polemical in its core. There had to be something about that Julia.
Well, I saw "Julia" and let me say it is a puzzling movie, quite literally in fact, the plot is structured like a jigsaw puzzle whose final picture is not just that eponymous Julia that keeps popping in Lillian's memory in well-placed flashbacks but also the source of that deep friendship. A friendship that was one encounter away from true love, one that wouldn't have been too subversive during the roaring twenties or in the pre-Nazi Vienna or Berlin.
Anyway, "Julia" could as well be titled "Julia and Lillian" and it's a shame that a film about two fascinating women couldn't allow us to reach any of them. But the film couldn't have been a failure even if it wanted to, for even the intellectual type of movie lover can't be insensible to the beautiful art-direction, a great rendition of the 30s like a sort of miniaturized version of a Lean epic and naturally, the performances.
The cast includes Jane Fonda who plays the famous writer Lillian Herman (author of "The Little Foxes"), Jason Robards is Dash Hammett, her companion (author of "The Maltese Falcon") and Vanessa Redgrave is the mysterious Julia preceded by a shadow of mystery. Maximilian Shell also makes a great impact in a role that only consists of three scenes. All these actors would be Oscar-nominated with Robards taking the other Oscar, although that win made much less noise.
It's a real shame that a film that invested so much talent could lose its way in a needlessly non-linear structure and fail to provide the very insights we expect from a movie dealing with the kind of people (I mean, writers) who expect to bring some three-dimensionality in their creations. The treatment clearly has a pretension of depth but it's very ironic that the screenplay from Alvin Sargeant, the third Oscar win of the film, is perhaps the least deserved.
Indeed, Julia, the very Julia that drives the action and gives a meaning to Lillian's constant torments, is never portrayed outside the realm of sheer idealization or victimization until it culminates with martyrdom. It's one of the few instances I can recall of a story where the subject is an object. And so we see Julia all right but not the real Julia, either from the POV of a friend who admired her deeply or during crucial moments where she follows rules.
We first see her as a young bourgeois girl (Lisa Pelikan) sharing her dreams with her friend (Susan Jones), then a medical student joining the Popular Front against the rise of fascism and later a mastermind of some secret operations, which forces her to spoil the only moment she has with Lillian, set at the present time and where both can communicate. Julia is cruelly two-dimensional, because even when we see her, we get the representation of Julia through Lillian's eyes, and the woman is never allowed to reveal the depths of her persona, why she joined the fight? What was her feelings? Her role simply shuts her down and entraps her in a range made of only two expressions: dignified resilience or resigned suffering.
The irony is that Jane Fonda, on the other hand, covers richer areas, she's selfish, ego-driven, ambitious, nervous, petty, enjoys being famous, throws a typewriter off the window out of exasperation, seeking compliments from her lover, she's so opposite to Julia that she's in fact more accessible, more real, rounded and natural... but even Fonda seems to be wasted in a role that blocks her impulses and give her no latitude to expand her characters except for that brief mission between Russia and Moscow that seems like a long build up to a climax that never happens.
That said, it's a pleasure to watch Jane Fonda and her interactions with Jason Robards are one of the film's highlights. I wonder though what prompted the Academy to make him win his second Oscar for a role that is basically the same than "All the President's Men". I know there's a lot of Oscar trivia involved in the film, which makes it all the more fitting that it's the debut of the most Oscar-nominated star ever: Meryl Streep.
Now, I said the film would please the intellectual type, I'm afraid the little shortcomings in the narrative structure might disappoint those who expect more 'punch' from a film that denounces the horrors of the Nazi regime, in other words, they might find the film boring... and as much as I didn't have trouble following it, it's true this is one of these period pieces forgotten like "Ragtime", "Tess" or "Reds".
I said it's ironic that a film about such fascinating women couldn't allow us to reach any of them, but in a way that echoes how strangely reality can work, it's also ironic that two women known for their radical views couldn't bring to the screen that very life that inhabit their roles... in fact, the film could have worked better if that "Julia" was half as interesting as the same Redgrave who made that speech.
I'm mentioning this incident because it preceded my viewing for at least one decade and it was so prevalent in my memory that I kept looking for signs of subversions within Redgrave's character or performance... surely a role that ignited such a fire had to be polemical in its core. There had to be something about that Julia.
Well, I saw "Julia" and let me say it is a puzzling movie, quite literally in fact, the plot is structured like a jigsaw puzzle whose final picture is not just that eponymous Julia that keeps popping in Lillian's memory in well-placed flashbacks but also the source of that deep friendship. A friendship that was one encounter away from true love, one that wouldn't have been too subversive during the roaring twenties or in the pre-Nazi Vienna or Berlin.
Anyway, "Julia" could as well be titled "Julia and Lillian" and it's a shame that a film about two fascinating women couldn't allow us to reach any of them. But the film couldn't have been a failure even if it wanted to, for even the intellectual type of movie lover can't be insensible to the beautiful art-direction, a great rendition of the 30s like a sort of miniaturized version of a Lean epic and naturally, the performances.
The cast includes Jane Fonda who plays the famous writer Lillian Herman (author of "The Little Foxes"), Jason Robards is Dash Hammett, her companion (author of "The Maltese Falcon") and Vanessa Redgrave is the mysterious Julia preceded by a shadow of mystery. Maximilian Shell also makes a great impact in a role that only consists of three scenes. All these actors would be Oscar-nominated with Robards taking the other Oscar, although that win made much less noise.
It's a real shame that a film that invested so much talent could lose its way in a needlessly non-linear structure and fail to provide the very insights we expect from a movie dealing with the kind of people (I mean, writers) who expect to bring some three-dimensionality in their creations. The treatment clearly has a pretension of depth but it's very ironic that the screenplay from Alvin Sargeant, the third Oscar win of the film, is perhaps the least deserved.
Indeed, Julia, the very Julia that drives the action and gives a meaning to Lillian's constant torments, is never portrayed outside the realm of sheer idealization or victimization until it culminates with martyrdom. It's one of the few instances I can recall of a story where the subject is an object. And so we see Julia all right but not the real Julia, either from the POV of a friend who admired her deeply or during crucial moments where she follows rules.
We first see her as a young bourgeois girl (Lisa Pelikan) sharing her dreams with her friend (Susan Jones), then a medical student joining the Popular Front against the rise of fascism and later a mastermind of some secret operations, which forces her to spoil the only moment she has with Lillian, set at the present time and where both can communicate. Julia is cruelly two-dimensional, because even when we see her, we get the representation of Julia through Lillian's eyes, and the woman is never allowed to reveal the depths of her persona, why she joined the fight? What was her feelings? Her role simply shuts her down and entraps her in a range made of only two expressions: dignified resilience or resigned suffering.
The irony is that Jane Fonda, on the other hand, covers richer areas, she's selfish, ego-driven, ambitious, nervous, petty, enjoys being famous, throws a typewriter off the window out of exasperation, seeking compliments from her lover, she's so opposite to Julia that she's in fact more accessible, more real, rounded and natural... but even Fonda seems to be wasted in a role that blocks her impulses and give her no latitude to expand her characters except for that brief mission between Russia and Moscow that seems like a long build up to a climax that never happens.
That said, it's a pleasure to watch Jane Fonda and her interactions with Jason Robards are one of the film's highlights. I wonder though what prompted the Academy to make him win his second Oscar for a role that is basically the same than "All the President's Men". I know there's a lot of Oscar trivia involved in the film, which makes it all the more fitting that it's the debut of the most Oscar-nominated star ever: Meryl Streep.
Now, I said the film would please the intellectual type, I'm afraid the little shortcomings in the narrative structure might disappoint those who expect more 'punch' from a film that denounces the horrors of the Nazi regime, in other words, they might find the film boring... and as much as I didn't have trouble following it, it's true this is one of these period pieces forgotten like "Ragtime", "Tess" or "Reds".
I said it's ironic that a film about such fascinating women couldn't allow us to reach any of them, but in a way that echoes how strangely reality can work, it's also ironic that two women known for their radical views couldn't bring to the screen that very life that inhabit their roles... in fact, the film could have worked better if that "Julia" was half as interesting as the same Redgrave who made that speech.