Being Julia (R) (104 min.) - All's fair in love and theater in Istvan Szabo's film, set in London's stage community during the 1930s. Julia Lambert, played glowingly by Annette Bening, doesn't play fair when she's crossed. But she plays to the rafters in stage plays that establish her as the West End's sweetheart. Meet her backstage, and you'll know what strenuous performances those are.
Julia could be a distant relative of Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond: too old to be an ingenue anymore, yet discovering a semblance of youth in an affair with a much younger man. She also could be related to Margo Channing, the All About Eve character blindsided by a cunning version of the ambitious actor she used to be. Being Julia would be considered overly derivative if the story hadn't been penned by W. Somerset Maugham (as the novella Theatre) years before those movies were produced.
It doesn't matter. Julia Lambert is the kind of inside-joke role that actors love playing, even if the rest of the movie is fairly standard. Bening relishes playing both sides of the prima donna facade, so grandly theatrical in her public life that we wonder if she's merely acting in her personal disasters. That brave face, those timely tears, could be an act. The measure of Bening's portrayal is that we aren't certain for a long time. The problem with Ronald Harwood's adapted screenplay is that we figure it out long before Julia's third act revenge.
Julia is coasting on her laurels when the film begins, sharing a "modern marriage" with her husband and theater manager, Michael Gosselyn (Jeremy Irons, looser than usual). The introduction of a young American fan named Tom Fennel (Shaun Evans) provides Julia with a randy distraction from the theater. She lends him money, shares his bed and worries about his attentions to a lovely, untalented actor (Lucy Punch). Scandals and recriminations are handled with British aplomb, making the material less spicy than it could be.
Whatever the script lacks in accumulating drama, it compensates for with an interesting supporting cast for Bening's excellent performance. Especially fine are Juliet Stevenson as Julia's dresser - an element Harwood memorably addressed in The Dresser - and Michael Gambon as Julia's dead acting teacher, imagined by his star pupil as her conscience or, more likely, confirmer of her sneakiest deeds. Bening upstages them all, as it should be.
Being Julia is easily the lightest film we've seen from Szabo, who usually leans toward downbeat wartime dramas (Mephisto, Taking Sides, Colonel Redl, Sunshine). It's a surprisingly good fit. His attention to details in fashion and architecture is intact, yet this time he's eager to amuse within those perfectly re-created settings. But it isn't entirely a stretch. For Szabo, theater is just another battlefield cloaked as entertainment, with words for bullets and ego as the victor's spoils. Grade: B
