Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Pauline Kael

“…. [The filmmakers] trust the author’s memory, but can we? Who can believe in the Julia she describes—the ideal friend of her early youth, the beautiful, unimaginably rich Julia who never fails to represent the highest moonstruck ideals? If ever there was a character preserved in the amber of a girlhood crush, she’s it. The gallant, adventurous Julia opens the worlds of art and conscience to the worshipful Lillian. She recites poetry and is incensed at the ugliness of the social injustices perpetrated by her own family; she goes off to study at Oxford, then to medical school in Vienna, intending to work with Freud; she plunges inot the dangerous opposition to Hitler, writes letters to Lillian explaining the holocaust to come, and in the middle of it has a baby. This saintly Freudian Marxist queen, on easy terms with Darwin, Engels, Hegel, and Einstein, might have been a joke with almost anyone but Vanessa Redgrave in the role. Redgrave’s height and full figure have an ethereal, storybook wonder, and she uses some of the physical spaciousness that she had on the stage in The Lady from the Sea; she can be majestic more fluidly than anyone else (and there’s more of her to uncoil). She has a scene all bandaged up in a hospital bed; unable to speak, she points with maybe the most expressive huge hand the screen has ever known. She handles the American accent unnoticeably—it’s not that awful flat twang she used for Isadora. In close-ups, Vanessa Redgrave has the look of glory, like the young Garbo in Arnold Genthe’s portraits; her vibrancy justifies Lillian’s saying that she had “the most beautiful face I’d ever seen.” Redgrave is so well endowed by nature to play queens that she can act simply in the role (which doesn’t embody much screen time) and casually, yet lyrically, embody Lillian Hellman’s dream friend. Zinnemann has very astutely cast as the teen-age Julia a young girl (Lisa Pelikan) who’s like a distorted Vanessa Redgrave—a fascinating, dislikable, rather creepy look-alike, who suggests that the intellecual goddess didn’t appear out of a white cloud.

“It’s the dark cloud—Jane Fonda’s stubborn strength,… that saves the film from being completely pictorial….”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, October 10, 1977
Taking It All In, pp. 306-307

Stanley Kauffmann

“Vanessa Redgrave is a divinity. If you think that legends about great actresses of the past are nothing but blather about the now-undisprovable, see Redgrave in virtually anything and you will see the stuff of those legends living and proved. Julia is far from a demanding role—for her—and you can see how she exceeds it, how easily she fills it with everything it was meant to hold and then, just as easily, makes it a bit bigger. Everything that is said about Julia, every attribute of generosity, brain, nobility, is so immediately true that love of Julia quickly replaces any questioning of Redgrave. Like most great actresses, her beauty is part of her talent: the first time we see Redgrave’s face, after some episodes with the two girls as children and teenagers, it’s like the sun after the first light. To see Redgrave striding toward us from the distance under the arches of Oxford, her scholar’s gown swinging, is to see eccentricity made central, grace rendered with humor. The way she reads Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Clothes” (in her book Hellman wrongly attributes the poem to Donne) is shaped like a small antique enameled box. The scenes in the Vienna hospital, wrapped and racked, the last scene in the Berlin café—they give a new shine to the word “genuine.”

“I expected the casting of Fonda and Redgrave to be a wonderful match. It turns out to be a bit one-sided, not in contest but in art. Fonda, as I was early to say and still know, is exceptionally gifted; but here Redgrave cuts finer and goes further, even allowing for the fact that she has the better part….”

Stanley Kauffmann
The New Republic, October 15, 1977
Before My Eyes, p. 295