"Being Julia"

Annette Bening plays a great actress in Istvan Szabo's resolute charmer -- and proves she is one, too.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Oct. 22, 2004 | Show people are different from you and me -- more high strung, more amusing, more devil-may-care -- but not, as István Szabó's resolute charmer "Being Julia" shows us, as different as we may think.

Annette Bening plays Julia Lambert, a stage actress in '30s London who has reached the peak of her career. She should be delighted, but she's mostly just exhausted and bored. Her fame is so firmly screw-bolted into place that she no longer even has to be good onstage -- all she has to do is show up. And having reached her mid-40s, she realizes there's no place to go but down. So she swans about in a constant state of distress and self-involvement, annoying her elegant, devotedly detached husband, Michael Gosselyn (Jeremy Irons), meeting not-so-clandestinely with gallant admirers (like Bruce Greenwood's dashing Lord Charles, who presents her with an expensive antique miniature portrait as his latest "We can't go on meeting like this" parting gift), and, in general, driving everyone around her mad.

Then Julia meets a young, fresh-scrubbed American with the equally fresh-scrubbed name Tom Fennell (Shaun Evans). Smitten with her, he invites her to tea in his one-room walk-up, an invitation she accepts out of bored amusement more than anything. With very little preamble (just one of Szabó's refreshingly blasé touches), the two soon find themselves tumbling about in Tom's narrow, rickety bed. And Julia, no longer bored, begins to really act again onstage. Offstage, acting has never been a problem -- it's how she evades the random disappointments of everyday life.

What's wonderful about "Being Julia" is that even though it sets us up for a dull, tidy lesson about the importance of truly knowing oneself, it ends up as something much more frothy but also more subtly complicated: "Being Julia" celebrates the benefits of using a combination of style, brains and artistry as a survival tactic. A sharp tongue, used judiciously, sometimes doesn't hurt. When, at a swank supper club, a scheming vixen at another table saunters over to remind Julia of her humble origins (she was born in Jersey, the daughter of a country doctor, and this woman knew her there), Julia informs her, in crisp, crooning tones, that her father was really a vet: "He used to go to your house and deliver the bitches -- the house was full of them."

"Being Julia" -- adapted by Ronald Harwood ("The Pianist") from a novella by W. Somerset Maugham -- is like a truffle in a fluted paper cup, a small delight made with care and attention to detail. The world of "Being Julia" is one of acute theatricality: Julia fakes big emotion when she's feeling nothing, and affects gay indifference when she's falling apart inside. Whatever she's feeling, she writes its opposite on the outside in big, loopy letters, signage that just about everyone (save her husband, who knows her through and through) falls for. But her stylized artificiality is part of who she is -- it is its own kind of authenticity -- and Szabó (best known for pictures like "Mephisto" and "Colonel Redl") uses a light touch to bring that across. He's out to revel in Julia's rampant actressiness, not punish her for it -- he sees it as a character trait, not a fatal flaw.

Next page: "I'm a slut, I'm just a rotten bitch"