Being Julia

Maturity and treachery beat youth and skill once again

I'm convinced that Annette Bening has the warmest and most enveloping of smiles. I'm enchanted.

In BEING JULIA, it's the latter half of the 1930s. Chamberlain is swanning about appeasing Hitler, and Julia Lambert (Bening) is the toast of the London stage. Julia and husband Michael (Jeremy Irons) own a West End theatre, and Lambert is the lead in the productions that Michael produces and directs. But Julia is bored with her current role, Michael, and life in general. She wants "something to happen". And what happens is the twenty-something Tom Fennel (Shaun Evans), a handsome, American, theatrical accountant recently brought aboard by her spouse Tom professes to be Julia's biggest fan and, without further ado, uses flattery and his youthful energy to insinuate his way into her bed, though it's not clear who's doing the seduction. While at first only amused at this diversion with someone less than half her age, Julia discovers she's in love with the boy. After all, aren't those real tears she sheds after discovering that her paramour is also rogering the young and beautiful stage star wannabe, Avice Crichton (Lucy Punch)? For Julia, whose ability to shed make-believe tears is a supreme talent, this veer-off into reality is a cruel blow. After Avice manipulates Tom, during a post-coital moment, to beseech Julia to arrange for her an audition with Michael for a role in his upcoming, Lambert agrees. This is Julia's first step in a deliciously scripted revenge against Tom, Avice, and indeed Michael himself once she learns that hubby begins a sexual dalliance with Crichton after hiring her. (Do you suppose the real world of live theatre is like this? Oh, say it isn't so!)

A film critic of national standing faulted BEING JULIA on the grounds that, being based on Somerset Maugham's 1937 book "Theater" that was excellently adapted to the Big Screen in ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), the basic material is now wheezily melodramatic. Well, excuse me. I've neither read the book or seen the earlier film - nor do I intend to - and I revel in my obvious cultural deficit. BEING JULIA, anchored upon Bening's tour de force performance, for which she recently won a Golden Globe, is a thoroughly delightful and entertaining production. As we see during Julia's public humiliation of her rival, Bening's luminous smile can camouflage razor blades.

While Annette steals the show, figuratively and literally, there are two supporting roles of note: Juliet Stevenson as Evie, Lambert's unflappable personal assistant and sometimes co-conspirator, and Thomas Sturridge as Julia's teenage son - only slightly younger than Tom - who, realizing his real life is but an extension of Mum's stage, painfully admits that he can never tell if her relationship with him represents acting or not.

I vacated my cinema seat immensely satisfied and, even beyond the thought required to regurgitate this review, have returned frequently in my mind's eye to revisit Bening's enchanting performance here as well as those past (THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT and OPEN RANGE in particular). She is surely one of America's most under-recognized and under-utilized actresses, and gives lie to the statement that Julia makes during BEING JULIA that great actresses don't do movies.

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