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An average movie

Posted : 5 years, 10 months ago on 18 May 2018 09:18

Since this movie had a solid reputation and since it was involving a strong cast and a very good director, I was really eager to check it out and I had some rather high expectations. Well, even though it was at the time a critical and commercial success, to be honest, I was actually surprised by how half-baked the whole thing turned out to be. I mean, the cast was really strong and this story definitely had some potential but it was just so damned murky, it just never really worked for me. First of all, I never had a clear sense about when the action was exactly taking place and I wasn't helped by some really useless and annoying back-and-forth jumps in time. On top of that, Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave looked exactly the same when they were supposedly teenagers and middle-aged women. Another issue was that the whole thing was supposed to be about this great friendship involving these 2 fascinating women but it was never really clear how they got acquainted with each other and, even worse, why they were so fond of each other. Indeed, during the really half-baked flashbacks, they gave some fairly meaningless scenes instead of showing why they became such great friends and they should have spent more time on this subject instead of showing Jane Fonda's character struggling to write some play. Anyway, to conclude, even though it turned out to be rather disappointing, I still think it is worth a look but there is no doubt that it could have been so much better.


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Julia

Posted : 6 years, 6 months ago on 3 September 2017 06:36

Quick ā€“ who is this movie actually about? If you answered anyone other than Lillian Hellman, then you clearly werenā€™t paying attention. Itā€™s frustrating to watch this, yet itā€™s so well made, impeccably acted, and contains bits of brilliance that youā€™re kept enthralled throughout. But why are we focusing all of our time with Hellman and not Julia?

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The answer is simple, Julia is based on a story in Pentimento, one of Hellmanā€™s, shall we say, embellished pieces of autobiography. We never get an actual sense of Julia as a person, of what defined and forged her choices and ultimate fate. What we get is a character that exists more as an ideal and memory, a ghostly apparition of radical political ideology, personal freedom, and persistent danger.

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The central friendship is hardly dealt with, as Julia is an abstraction to Lillian, a point of obsession. For Julia, Lillian isā€¦a courier? Thereā€™s an imbalance of attention and detail going on here that undoes much of the dramatic tension and centrality of the narrative. It suffers from forcing us into Hellmanā€™s perspective. We spend far more time watching her struggle to write plays, gain success and affluence, and spar with her longtime companion, Dashiell Hammett (a subtle and knockout turn from Jason Robards).

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Yet Vanessa Redgraveā€™s performance as Julia is hypnotic and ensnaring. She manages to play a character thatā€™s borderline impossible with enough life, vitality, and strength that itā€™s impossible to not understand Lillianā€™s obsession with her. A reunion scene between the two women is a marvel of Redgrave and Jane Fondaā€™s tremendous talents on full display. Fonda must play the entire scene with a calm exterior as confusion and anxiety threaten to poke through the surface, while Redgrave holds an intense stare and keeps still. Her eyes look tired and doomed. She knows that this is one final desperate attempt at saving herself that may not work. Redgrave constantly reassures Fonda with quietly given instructions.

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It is in this scene that we realize just how much the rest of the film is missing. More scenes with Fonda and Redgrave where theyā€™ll allowed to create a believable chemistry as longtime friends, more moments where the two actresses can go toe-to-toe and bring out surprising choices with each other. But this sounds like a discredit to what Fonda is doing with her role as Lillian Hellman. Sheā€™s dynamite, and if this was a straight portrait of the writer, a woman who smoke, drank, and spat angry words out on her typewriter with equal amounts of passion and commitment, that would be one thing. But this is ostensibly about Julia, and Julia is a mere enigma.

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Thereā€™s so many good things going on that Julia begins to feel overstuffed and splitting at the seams. Thereā€™s at least two or three different movies operating at any given time, and any one of them would be worth following to the end. What we get is several different films vying for our attention and muting each other out. Still, this is the peak years for Fonda, and sheā€™s enough of a reason for watching this. Robards and Redgrave are another two, and despite its shapelessness, Julia is an engrossing piece of work.



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