"....That is not to decry Jane Fonda's performance. She is the center of the film and has the great variety of stress, suffering, and brooding of a woman too committed to relax. She does sometimes look like Hellman, and she does catch the awful threat of appearing afraid. Equally, Jane herself in the last two years has moved rapidly enough from denim to Oscar-night satin to understand Lillian's confused feelings for pretty clothes...."

David Thomson
Real Paper (Boston), get date

Stanley Kauffmann

"....What saves the writing scenes here, and the reading-and-opinion scenes, is that Jane Fonda is Hellman and Jason Robards is Hammett. They concentrate so hard and well, knowing that they are bucking every composer-and-teacher painter-and-master film ever made, that they legitimate the scenes, even if they can't really make them overwhelming.

“Fonda, not made up to look like Hellman but certainly looking less than her usual knockout self, always has a base-line of authenticity in her acting beneath which she simply cannot go--she is just too instinctually sound. But there are corners smudged in her performance here, lines not etched quite sharply enough, actions and reactions "told" us, rather than fulfilled. For instance, in here scenes with Julia's courier in Paris--played agreeably by Maximilian Schell--I kept wondering about Hellman's feelings, instead of feeling them. The stabs were missing: I saw only the knife flashes. Generally I felt I was watching Fonda work toward the part: I kept wishing that most scenes had been filmed about two weeks later….

“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
New Republic, 1977

Andrew Sarris

“…. I have never considered it a particular privilege to worship at the shrine of Lillian Hellman .... Jane Fonda has worked hard to interpret Lillian Hellman without merely idolizing her, but it is in the very nature of the self-absorption of Hellman, and the inescapable solitude of writers, that Fonda's performance slips into posing, particularly when she chain-smokes in front of her typewriter and goes into paper-crumpling tantrums when she is dissatisfied with her copy. Her scenes with Robards's Dash are pleasant, but portentously cryptic.... [Fonda's] emotionally and dramatically obligatory scenes must be those with Vanessa Redgrave's Julia, and they are simply not there. Fonda and Redgrave stare at each other intensely enough, but these two extraordinary actress-personalities completely fail to connect or communicate in an interesting manner. We must take their relationship on faith, and my faith, in this instance, is very shaky.”

Andrew Sarris
Village Voice, get date

David MacKenzie

 "... None of the players has more than a few lines or a scene here and there, not even the very talented, shimmeringly beautiful, and now-notorious Miss Redgrave. That is, of course, with the exception of Jane Fonda as Miss Hellman, constantly puffing cigarettes, telephoning Julia from all kinds of fancy hotel rooms in European cities, and worrying endlessly about her writing talents. 

"Many people don't like Miss Fonda because of her political views. I don't give a hang about her political views any more than I do Miss Redgrave's or John Wayne's. The fact is, Miss Fonda is a great actress to watch. She has a combination of nervous energy, spunk, and little-girl fragility that I for one find delightful, and she gets everything out of her portrayal of Hellman there is. What there is, though, isn't much... Miss Hellman in this film, as in life, is a person of curious contradictions...."

David MacKenzie, Tulsa World, April 23, 1978

(Published on this blog October 1, 2021.)

Jack Kroll

“….[N]o actresses could be more appropriate, professionally and symbolically, to play these roles than Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, both remarkable performers, both born 40 years ago, both members of distinguished theatrical families, both controversial women who insisted on playing highly visible roles in left-wing politics. In "Julia," Fonda and Redgrave are close to perfection, and the pathos and power of friendship they create is the movie's great virtue.

"...."Julia" is moving in its glowing commitment to the power of friendship. The climax of the film is Lillian's last meeting with Julia in a Berlin restaurant, a powerful scene staged definitively by Zinnemann and acted stunningly by Fonda and Redgrave, who create a heartbreaking interplay of emotions without a taint of sentimentality. Lillian and Julia will never see each other again, but in the paranoid air of Nazi Germany in 1937 they can't fully express their feeling. They exchange information tersely about the latest events in their lives--Julia has had a baby, Lillian has had a Broadway success. This enforced casualness forces their faces into dramatic emblems--Julia's luminous, valedictory smile and Lillian's bitten-back, angry tears....

“Aliveness and immediacy are what's most important about Jane Fonda. She's never used her acting to project any kind of ideology or dogma; it's always the electric impact of observed life that comes through sharp and clear.... [Fonda] is likely to be the most important figure in this latest, uncertain cycle [the re-emergence of women in central film role] in a notoriously cycle-happy industry. In the end, a Jane Fonda is more important for the pleasure and enlightenment of audiences than the unseemly scrambling of moneymen. Her career already has the shape, the grace, the movielike drama of the most interesting female movie careers, like Hepburn's or Lombard's. She's a fine actress whose very behavior seems to mean something to us even before we connect it with the role she's playing. And despite her sometimes strident radicalizing that angered many Americans in a divided time, she's an image in the American grain--direct, clear, appealing, with the resilience of the old American optimism, good faith and high spirits in her movements and her voice.

"In this, she's very much her father's child...."

Jack Kroll
Newsweek cover story, get date

Molly Haskell

“In Julia, one word of grown-up dialogue, one exchange between Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave as conversing adults, would have been worth the thousand pictures in bucolic settings designed to show the wordless harmony of their friendship. Here we have two of the most electrifying women in movies in a casting coup that is not only iconographically but politically inspired: Redgrave as Julia, the total activist and martyr to Fascism; Fonda as the acolyte, the rebellious but self-doubting playwright Lillian.

“We expect some sort of fireworks, yet all we get is one scene in which the two meet as adults, and connect: the brief, vivid scene in the railway café--taken straight from Hellman's story-- in which the baffled Lillian turns over contraband money to her friend. The rest is mostly filler, as Zinneman tries to suggest the scope and historical context of the period with dazzling location sequences that are a poor substitute for the emotional and political terrain left unexplored....

“Fonda catches some of the moral severity that is gathering into Lillian's face, but her portrayal of Lillian-the-writer falls back on the usual absurd hyperboles by which movies have always tried to inject action into an essentially inactive operation: She sits hunched and frazzled over the antique Royal, nonfilter cigarette dangling from her mouth. Then she rips the page from the machine, balls it up, and throws it away. (Has any writer ever done this? Aren't we usually, if not delighted with the just-finished page, at least content to sit on it for a while?)

“Dressed in baggy sweater and heavily unmade-up, Fonda strains to convince us she is a Real Woman and an Important one. But in equating sartorial seediness with seriousness of purpose Julia resorts to the kind of skin-deep visual clichés that it presumably means to avoid. Why not suggest the surprising Hellman--the woman who will become a legend in mink, the woman Sheilah Graham refers to in The Garden of Allah--as a sexy dish!”

New York, October 19, 1977

“If I’m leery of so-called “breakthroughs” in women’s roles, it’s because I’ve heard this tune before. Back when 1977 was turning into 1978, critics and pundits made the somewhat belated discovery that something had been missing from movies and acknowledged what that missing something was by dubbing 1977 “The Year of the Woman.” That was the year of Julia, The Turning Point, The Goodbye Girl, and Annie Hall, and what all the shouting meant was that there were finally enough women in leading roles to fill the five slots for the Academy Award nominees without voters having to upgrade supporting actresses for that purpose.

“Not that these films, particularly the first two, weren’t interesting and noteworthy in themselves. Julia … took its women, and its politics, fairly seriously....[I]n Julia, the reckless heroism of the radical Redgrave character is used to expose the caution and timidity of the Fonda “moderate.” But at least in those few tantalizing scenes in which they come together as adults, one feels, beneath the differences, the sparks of attraction and intimacy, strong ties of friendship….”

Molly Haskell
Psychology Today, January 1983

See Haskell’s comments “riveting performances” in Playgirl?