Being Julia, the new backstage romance from Istvan Szabo (Sunshine, Mephisto), is a flimsy frame surrounding a brightly colored performance by Annette Bening, whose quick, high-spirited charm is on marvelous display. As Julia Lambert, a star of the prewar London theater uneasily stepping into middle age, Bening shows both fragility and dignity, managing a hectic plot with glamour and aplomb.
Around her, the soundtrack buzzes with fluting accents and late-1930s pop tunes, and the screen hums with period-appropriate costumes and accessories, among which Jeremy Irons's delightful mustache must surely be counted.
Irons, unusually chipper, plays Michael Gosselyn, Julia's director and manager, who is also -- almost incidentally -- her husband. Though they have a nearly grown son, their marital relations are, in Michael's phrase, "terribly modern." For male companionship, Julia favors Lord Charles (Bruce Greenwood), who declines to become her lover for reasons that become clear rather late in the game.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL
In the meantime, she falls for a stage-struck young American named Tom Fennel (Shaun Evans) and, at least for a while, their affair gives Julia a second taste of youth. She throws herself into it with a mixture of calculation and abandon that only a seasoned thespian could pull off.
Part of the delight of watching Bening pivot gracefully from steely composure to histrionic distress comes from the feeling of witnessing two bravura performances at once. She gives Being Julia a giddy, reckless effervescence that neither Szabo's stolid direction nor Ronald Harwood's lurching script (adapted from a novel by Somerset Maugham) are quite able to match.
For the most part, the other cast members -- in particular, Irons, Juliet Stevenson, Michael Gambon and Miriam Margolyes -- behave gallantly, ornamenting Bening's diva turn with sharp, comic grace notes.
But the emotional center of the film is empty. Tom is a variation on a Jamesian type, an innocent abroad who may really be a callous, callow adventurer. But apart from his collegiate good looks, Evans brings nothing to the part to convince you that this boy could win Julia's heart, much less break it. He has all the sexual magnetism of a boiled potato, and it is hard to believe that such a bland fellow could throw the likes of her into such a swivet.
But what a swivet it is. Bening walks right up to the edge of melodramatic bathos (the hallmark of the kind of plays in which Julia stars) and then, in a wonderful climactic coup de theater, turns it all into farce.
Being Julia may not make much psychological or dramatic sense, but Bening, pretending to be Julia (who is always pretending to be herself), is sensational.
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