Being Julia

TAKE ONE, Sept-Dec, 2004 by Maurie Alioff

BACK IN EARLY AUGUST, I asked British playwright and veteran screenwriter Ronald Harwood what he loves most about the theatre and how it differs from film. He zeroed in on the heart of the matter: "It's live, and that can be very bad and very wonderful. The performances change." A completed movie is fixed in its final shape, Harwood continued. "Annette Bening is not going to let me down. But the theatre is a much more dangerous operation."

The movie Harwood is referring to is Being Julia, his most recent screen adaptation. His other credits include Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist, currently in production, last year's The Statement directed by Norman Jewison and The Pianist, which earned Harwood, Polanski and Adrien Brody Oscars[R] in 2002, not to mention the Cannes Palme d'Or. You might remember the prolific screenwriter accepting his Academy Award with unaffected enthusiasm and gratitude.

Based on a 1947 Somerset Maugham novel Theatre, Being Julia originated, Harwood explained, with "a brilliant young British producer called Mark Milln. He acquired the rights and came to me with the book." Long before Milln approached him, Harwood had considered buying the rights himself, so he was immensely excited. "I read the book again and knew exactly how I wanted to do it." Eventually, Canada's own megaproducer, Robert Lantos, with whom Harwood collaborated on The Statement, took Being Julia from early development to its screening as the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival's opening night gala. According to Harwood, Lantos is "a very good man and a very good producer," even if he does sometimes get a little too hands-on with his writers and directors. Lantos is from the "David Selznick school" of producing, Harwood chuckled, "the Irving Thalberg de nos jours."

A polished film tastefully directed by Hungarian Istvan Szabo, Lantos's collaborator on Sunshine (1999), Being Julia fits into the long tradition of backstage pictures that range from manic farces and breezy romances to potent dramas suffused in the glow of footlights. As in many films of the genre, the theatre in Being Julia is both a self-contained milieu separate from the real world, and, as Harwood suggests when he talks about its creative risk-taking, a reflection of life's wild cards and existential challenges. Far lighter in tone than John Cassavetes's Opening Night (1977), and pitched closer to the urbane wit of Joseph Mankiewicz's All about Eve (1950), Szabo's film shares with these two classics the central figure of an aging female star whose professional and personal crises intersect. Moreover, like All about Eve, Being Julia depicts a manipulative young actress, a somewhat distant husband and a loyal, sharp-tongued female assistant.

Mankiewicz's picture (coincidentally based on a short story published the same year as Maugham's novel), is all about the relationship between the aging Margo Channing (Bette Davis) and the cunning ingenue Eve (Anne Baxter), who is out to usurp her position. While London stage star Julia Lambert (Bening) gets deceived by a less malevolent version of Eve in Being Julia, her story is all about her relationship to herself. Set in the 1930s, the picture opens with a burst of theatrical bravado. A Dickensian figure in a flowing scarf lurching toward us turns out to be Jimmie Langston (Michael Gambon), a one-time associate of Julia and her producer husband, Michael (Jeremy Irons). A flashback character in Maugham's novel, the long-dead Jimmie was transformed by Harwood's script into a larger-than-life creature who is, says the writer, "constantly in Julia's psyche." Simultaneously cynical and reverential about his obsession--the theatre--Langston appears throughout the film as Julia's amoral Jiminy Cricket, at one point advising her that opening her legs to a young lover will revive her creative passion.

Julia flashes on Jimmie, a ghost from her past, because her self-confidence is eroding. The beloved star of crowd--pleasers she performs in the West End theatre she owns with Michael, 45-year-old Julia despairs that her lustre will soon fade. Moreover, tired of non-stop role-playing on and off stage ("I never know when you're acting," says another character), her performances are becoming mechanical. Although her marriage is a model of genial sophistication, the absence of passion in the apparently open relationship obviously gets to her. To top things off, an attractive male friend (Bruce Greenwood) thinks they should end their relationship.

The jaded actress gets yanked out of her state of limbo when she abandons herself to an affair with Tom (Shaun Evans), an American about the same age as her son, Roger (Thomas Sturridge). For Harwood, Maugham's primary interest in the story was "the older woman and the younger man. And he set it, very cleverly I think, against the theatre background." Once Julia gives into her desire--unaware that the grinning American is not as innocent as he seems--her eyes brighten, her smile widens and the world-weary sarcasm of the opening scenes transforms into giddy excitement.