Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave play friends separated by time in Fred Zinnemann's award-bait Julia |
That’s the meat of Fred Zinnemann’s old-fashioned,
highly-genteel memory piece that also manages to make it sound far more
exciting and interesting than the dry, worthy, middle-brow story that actually
ends up on screen. What’s missing from the film almost completely is passion.
This is a story that required fire: a sympathy for radicalism, or anger at the
targeted cruelty and injustice of fascism. It gets none of this, instead
offering a handsome reconstruction of period details, all filmed with a Golden
Age glow, and a narrative focus that feels like it’s aimed at the wrong
character.
It’s part of why this awards-bait drama hasn’t lasted in the
public perception (it’s very hard to find a copy to watch – really striking for
a film nominated for 11 Oscars and winning three, including two acting Oscars).
There is very little really rewarding either emotionally or narratively here.
The film lacks a real sense of danger or foreboding – even a scene showing fascist
thugs throwing Jewish students off a balcony in Vienna is shot with a striking
lack of edge or horror. And it unbalances itself by giving more time and
priority to Hellman’s struggles to come up with a play “worthy of her” than it
does to the title character and the real drama of her struggles. Redgrave
is on screen for about 14 minutes. It’s effectively like watching The
Pianist but entirely from the perspective of Emilia Fox’s character rather
than Adrien Brody’s.
What we end up with is a film that feels old-fashioned, dry
and respectable. It offers everything that will impress you, and reassure you
that it is important film-making: a big subject, famous names, actors giving
emotional performances, period detail, a tragic ending. But it lines these
factors up in a way that never ever comes to life dramatically. There is a
story buried in here about friendship – and Fonda and Redgrave are very good at
selling a strong personal bond, especially considering their limited time on
screen together – but what should be the heart of the story gets lost in a
biography of Hellman, a digression into her relationship with Dashiell Hammett,
and the lack of insight the film seems to have into the fate of Jews and
outsiders in an increasingly fascist Europe.
The film’s only real sequence of interest is Hellman’s dash
with money across the border and illicit meeting with Julia, a sequence
involving coded messages, switching of hats and double-meaning conversation
which fits with a spy novel. Zinnemann films this with a fine air of tension
and intrigue – but it’s the only time the film stumbles to life.
I think Zinnemann struggled to find what really compelled
him to tell this story. Which is a shame as a Julia-focused story – a woman
struggling against a system – would have been meat and drink to the director of
High Noon, From Here to Eternity and A Man For All Seasons.
Instead, his skill from those films of empathising with characters trapped in a
desperate situation and forced to take a stand on principle, is lost. In the
end he and the film find little to interest them in Hellman, the successful
novelist who feels a middle-class intellectual’s guilt at not doing more to
help, who is fundamentally a footnote in a far larger story of rising Nazi
terror in Europe.
The film has also perhaps faded from public attention because
subsequent controversy revealed that a large part of this true story was almost
certainly self-aggrandising bull-shit by Hellman. A New York psychiatrist,
Muriel Gardiner, claimed in 1983 that Julia’s story was her story and that she
had never met Hellman (but they did share a lawyer). No trace of a “Julia” has
been found in Hellman’s life, and no evidence at all that she ever undertook
this dangerous dash into Germany. Zinnemann also fell out with Hellman,
privately coming to believe she was “an extremely talented, brilliant woman,
but she was a phony character” and said his “relations with her were very
guarded and ended in pure hatred”. Knowing that, it’s hard not to see the same
distance on the screen.
Saying that, Jane Fonda is very good in the film, surprisingly
fragile, uncertain and scared, and plagued with guilt that she cannot do enough
to help her friend. Redgrave won an Oscar for her committed and passionate
performance, which tapped into her radicalism and gives a slight character a
great deal of depth (in her speech, the pro-Palestinian Redgrave made a famously
controversial political speech denouncing “Zionist hoodlums”). Robards won the
film’s other acting Oscar, for a professional turn as Hammett. In a very weak
year for American film, Schell also landed an Oscar nomination for a brief
cameo as a go-between Hellman meets in a Parisian park.
The performances are fine and the style and manner of the
film is reassuringly middle-of-the-road. There is everything here to convince
you this is an important film, apart from drama, purpose or conviction. Perhaps
it’s so hard to find, because so few people have looked for it since 1977?
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