BEING JULIA Review – Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons, Shaun Evans d: István Szabó

BEING JULIA (2004)

Direction: István Szabó

Cast: Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons, Shaun Evans, Bruce Greenwood, Miriam Margolyes, Juliet Stevenson, Lucy Punch, Michael Gambon, Sheila McCarthy, Leigh Lawson, Rosemary Harris, Rita Tushingham

Screenplay: Ronald Harwood; from W. Somerset Maugham's 1937 novel Theatre

Oscar Movies

Recommended with Reservations

Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons, Being Julia

A LITTLE ABOUT AVICE

In Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1950 Oscar-winning classic All About Eve, Bette Davis plays Margo Channing, a major Broadway star who, despite her talent and wit, falls prey to the ambitious wannabe Eve Harrington: sweet, soft-spoken Anne Baxter on the outside; ruthless, poisonous gargoyle on the inside.

More than a decade earlier, in 1937 to be exact, W. Somerset Maugham had written Theatre, a novel about West End diva Julia Lambert (who four years later would be played onstage by Cornelia Otis Skinner). In Maugham's tale, Julia (Annette Bening), despite her talent and wit, succumbs to her vanity when she falls madly in love with Tom Fennel (Shaun Evans), a handsome — and deceptively innocent-looking — American half her age. Through Tom's "special friendship" with Julia, an ambitious young actress, Avice Crichton (Lucy Punch), who also happens to be the young man's lover, will attempt to jumpstart her career by getting a crucial role in Julia's next play.

Being Julia is the latest filmization of Maugham's novel. (Lilli Palmer, for one, had co-starred with Charles Boyer in a 1962 Franco-Austrian adaptation, Adorable Julia.) Boasting a cast that includes Bening, Jeremy Irons, Bruce Greenwood, Miriam Margolyes, and veterans Rosemary Harris and Rita Tushingham, and with renowned director István Szabó at the helm (his 1982 Mephisto won that year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar), this new version had to be, at the very least, half as good as All About Eve.

Unfortunately, Julia is indeed only half as good as Eve — partly because of Ronald Harwood's uninspired screenplay adaptation (if the source material was itself weak, Harwood surely didn't make it all that much better) and partly because Szabó's comedy timing feels more than a bit off.

Even so, by being half as good as the 1950 classic while providing Annette Bening with one of the best roles of her career, this slightly backhanded paean to the theater world is still more enjoyable than most of what gets made nowadays.

Note: A version of this Being Julia review was initially posted in December 2004.