THE BADNESS OF "JULIA"
Walzer, Judith B.
This is a bad movie. Surprisingly so, since it had a naturally sympathetic subject on which there is likely to be universal agreement in feeling. The reviewers haven't let on to its failure,...
...All of Europe in crisis is made to seem full of strange overcoated creatures who give Lily mysterious directions in the manner of amateurish spy flicks...
...she gives her life...
...But the movie makes the worst hash of this possibility...
...The movie is spoiled by an artificial sense of the visual that current filmmakers have cultivated beyond all measure and common sense...
...It combines political thoughtlessness with aesthetic pretentiousness...
...her memories are full of a sense of the times, the shudders of a real fear, and the sorrow of remembering what happened to a friend...
...What people do and say to make a lively and interesting imitation of reality is forgotten as if it were completely unimportant...
...Otherwise the scene is people with silly Americans drinking themselves from one hotel to another en route to a theater festival in Moscow, without seeming in the slightest aware of what's going on...
...Lily, a writer growing old, remembers a brave friend of her youth, the brilliant Julia who became involved in the struggles against Nazism and finally died as an active member of the underground...
...The easy assumption that we all know what to think, it doesn't have to be spoken or presented, betrays our common opinion just as the elegant and expensive slickness falsifies what we should be seeing...
...Lily sees her once in Vienna after she has been beaten up in the February days of 1934...
...She might have made an excellent Sancho Panza for Redgrave's Don Quixote, but with that script it was impossible...
...There's more tension in Hellman's short essay than in all the endless, wandering film...
...Where it might have been rich with the details of a common historical memory, the movie uses those references cheaply, gliding over and ignoring their specificity, and ends in denying their importance out of sheer thoughtlessness...
...She's "scrappy" as Hammett quips, "the neighborhood bulldog...
...That a rich, beautiful, and gifted American heiress studying medicine in Vienna should be converted to socialism and then deeply commit herself to the antifascist work of the underground seems real enough...
...Only pretty pictures...
...Jane Fonda tries hard, but she is deserted by the script before she has a chance...
...In Scoundrel Time she denies political complexity in an effort to make us feel there was only one simple truth at stake—her own—but here she is far less disingenuous...
...Instead of accepting the story in its integrity they slide away from it as if it had no meaning for them...
...We "root" for Fonda—at least those of us who remember the original of that square-jawed, open, straight-toothed American face of hers and that no-nonsense style of acting...
...This might have been a movie to set out on an exploration of a youthful friendship between two women...
...And beauty distorted by lack of sense and significance is inevitably cheapened...
...No story was ever hurt by such simplicity, especially when varied enough to keep us attentive...
...What good lines there are come directly from the essay (like Lily saying "hello" frantically to her contact at the railroad station because it's their password) or from some other Hellman writings (like the scene in which Hammett tells her all the things she could be instead of a writer...
...Even the ethereal Vanessa Redgrave (who doesn't look like anybody else) can't manage to make Julia more than a presence...
...Now Hellman's essay "Julia" from Pentimento cannot be blamed for the movie, although in itself it is a slight piece, with some of the careless politics 245 the author's essays often have...
...No wonder her writer friend might want to use her story to remember the experience of a generation...
...11 IF IT WAS a thin story that Julia offered them, the screenwriters made no attempt to invent, to fill in between the lines...
...The most unfortunate result of this total concentration on pictorialization is what happens to the characters...
...They are true to one another, as good friends are, and true to the struggle they, and we, believed in...
...She does this successfully, sees Julia briefly in Berlin, and soon after retrieves her friend's ashes from London after she has been fatally wounded...
...The story disintegrates into bewildering episodes, the occasions into odd, disconnected moments representing nothing but themselves...
...The screenwriter thinks he can get an effect of tension and suspense without any lines, just by showing what happened...
...Its badness is the kind they may have become inured to, typical of a style and attitude in contemporary films...
...The movie they created constitutes the worst kind of political "name-dropping"—just mention the event, we "know" what to think of it...
...Only Hammett—Jason Robards, Jr.—manages to sustain an impression, and that's probably because of the association with all the other characters he's played, that grizzled look and gravelly voice helped by a few good scenes he shares with Fonda and easily commands...
...There's no way to prove that the poor political content of the film is intrinsically connected to all its artistic weaknesses, but one can't help but feel it all along...
...Perhaps Redgrave and Fonda were drawn to it for that reason...
...q 246...
...A story straightforward in meaning...
...She pretends to no profound analysis of history, what counts is the love for a wonderful friend...
...The movie is sloppy about the history it deals with and, as if to compensate, relies on visual details for their own sake...
...Lily being drawn to her friend, worshipping her, a hug and "I love you, Julia"—that's about all we get...
...The story is a modest one...
...One ought to realize, I guess, in the early parts of the movie as the camera fixedly follows the movement of a Rolls down a road through beautiful, dark woods entranced with its angle of vision above the little figure on the hood of the car, that nothing of much substance will follow...
...But so little does happen and most of it is so confused and vague, that the viewer ends up being asked for sympathy based on nice meandering photography and a few allusions to a good cause...
...Her rhetoric achieves its effects by the sharp, somewhat unexpected turns of feeling at the ends of indefatigably plain straight sentences...
...It's a sentimental effect overall, tough but sentimental, and she's a master of it, much as Hemingway from whom she probably learned the technique was: the tougher she gets, the more we are assured of the heart of gold within...
...Julia's creators had an easier task before them—a plain antifascist story of heroism in a desperate time...
...The same unwillingness to be inventive, to put one's cards on the table, to speak out, is evident in all aspects of the work...
...Julia is a heroine...
...We have, over the years, fairly drowned in idealizations of the male version of this friendship that our culture has specialized in since David and Jonathan...
...But the moviemakers saw only the most superficial of those possibilities...
...On this view the beauty of what we see—the motion, connection, and juxtaposition of images— displaces a sense of the story...
...Not that it couldn't happen and probably did, but who were those people, what were they doing and what on earth is going on...
...There is beautiful photography in Julia, but it is only that...
...The woods around the grandparents' estate, trains steaming eastward in Europe through the snow and pine forests, some formidable glimpses of locomotives pulling into vast 19-century railroad stations, are all without a meaningful connection to something that is being said...
...Julia is parasitic on our moral and political conventions without ever making honest use of them...
...Lily is courageous in her own small way...
...It assumes our feelings about the political conflict without ever embodying them and making them real...
...The essay is engaging whatever its flaws...
...he has most of the good lines in the movie...
...The reviewers haven't let on to its failure, perhaps they didn't notice...
...For what seems like hours, there's no dialogue and when there is, it's rudimentary, laughably so, at moments that scarcely need comedy...
...Some recent foreign films on World War II, without blurring accepted notions about rights and wrongs, have risked a greater complexity of characterization, Lacombe, Lucien and Les Violons du Bal for example...
...Through it the still angry old woman remembers the fiery humors of her youth...
...At least here Hellman's identification with the "good cause" is not only that...
...A few years later in Paris, the writer agrees to carry $50,000 for Julia and her comrades to Berlin in order to ransom prisoners...
Vol. 25 • April 1978 • No. 2
