Wednesday, March 23, 2005

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?

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