Respond to these rapid questions in our Julia quiz and we will tell you which Julia character you are. Play it now.
“Julia” is the story of a fascinating woman, told from the perspective of someone who had only a passing acquaintance with her prior to the novel’s publication. To be fair to Lillian Hellman, whose wartime memoirs served as the inspiration for the story, I recognize that this is an unkind judgment. However, the film’s problems begin with its point of view, and it is never able to fully recover from these issues.
The film is organized as a tribute to a particular memory. Our narration begins with Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman, who tells us about this great friend of her youth, Julia (Vanessa Redgrave), and how she grew up to become a brave and doomed woman. However, the film never really establishes a relationship between the two women; rather, it merely documents their attitudes toward one another. Julia is a goddess in Lillian’s eyes. But who is Lillian in Julia’s eyes? In the film’s lengthy central scene, a courier says the following: A group of women, including Lillian, are recruited to transport large sums of Julia’s money into pre-war Germany in order to purchase the freedom of several hundred Jews and other detainees. Although Julia and Lillian exchange the longest of the film’s rare stretches of dialogue in a Vienna cafe, there is no genuine exchange of confidences between the two of them even in this scene. Aside from adopting a sort of understated, heroic posture, Julia appears to be acting as she believes a heroine from the Eric Ambler novels should be acting.
It’s awkward how the film has to suspend itself between Julia, who is the ostensible subject, and Lillian Hellman, who is the true subject of the film. When Jane Fonda portrays the young woman playwright who banged out her frustrations on a typewriter, who chain-smoked, who drank too much (and lived with Dashiell Hammett, who also drank too much), she paints an interesting portrait of the young woman playwright who eventually became the legend we all know and love today. We adore this Lillian to the point where we wouldn’t object to her being the subject of a whole movie in her own right.
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But, no, the movie makes the pretense that it is about Julia. As a result, we get romantic flashbacks, heroic musings on the soundtrack, and one story trying to fit into the other and tearing its seams apart. We see the movie’s central weakness when we look at its two relationships in comparison to one another. The one between Lillian and “Dash” is, I suppose, primarily intended to serve as background and atmosphere, but Fonda and Jason Robards, Jr. bring it to life with their performances. They give it more depth: When Hammett finally gives his blessing to one of Hellman’s plays, we believe it is a historic moment in American theater.
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There are only two notes between Lillian and Julia, on the other hand. There are two types of childhood idolatry: one is beautiful to watch but impossible to take seriously, such as the scene in which the two adolescent girls idealize their own emotions. In the other, Julia takes part in adult role-playing games, in which she strides purposefully through Oxford and then through Europe, portraying the kind of heroic radical in which Vanessa Redgrave has occasionally imagined herself. Lillian can look on with admiration and envy because she is by her side. She, on the other hand, is unable to connect.
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What you really have, buried deep within the memoir, is Lillian’s unspoken wish that she had had a better relationship with Julia. Julia, on the other hand, continues to be a mystery. Key events in Lillian’s life are depicted, and she even revels in the success of her first Broadway performance, but there is no comparable information about Julia presented in the film. She remains a distant symbol, a role model for what women can accomplish, and a cultural icon.
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Many of the reviews for “Julia” went on and on about the relationship that the film portrays between two women, and many of the reviewers discovered in the film all sorts of feminist lessons that they could apply to their own lives. That’s just wishful thinking on my part. The only genuine relationship depicted in the film is that between a man and a woman, and, if anything, “Julia” demonstrates how difficult it was forty years ago for two women, even emancipated intellectual women, to communicate on an equal footing.
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Perhaps in order to disguise this flaw, director Fred Zinnemann includes a lengthy, potentially suspenseful set-piece in the middle of the film, which follows Lillian as she attempts to smuggle the money into Germany. The caper is acted and directed in such an awkward manner that we find it difficult to follow it at times. Time is off, significant glances are insignificant, and the adventure appears to have been concocted solely for the purpose of filling screen time.
If “Julia” had been about Julia, that would have been a step up in terms of storytelling. If the story had been about Lillian, that would have been a great source of inspiration for me. Why was a movie made that isn’t really about either of them?
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