Product: Julia (1971)
Rating: 4.0
Truth? Fiction? Or Just A Darned Good Story
Occasionally, when I'm dashing off a review for amazon.com, I will try to adopt a less subjective, somewhat more professional style. Sometimes this is little more than a kind of writing exercise: sometimes it may be just because I've looked at some of my other reviews and seen (much to my own embarrassment) how often the pronoun "I" comes up. Who needs that?But then *I* think there really are some advantages to talking about film in a subjective mode. Perhaps more than any other art form (except maybe, popular music and--if you view it as an artform--television), the movies just about beg for a subjective analysis. It's what made reading Pauline Kael so much fun after all. Ultimately, movie criticism is about what you like, what moved you, whether or not you could relate to the action on the screen, whether or not you even WANTED to relate to the action on the screen. The whole schmier.And another advantage to the subjective approach--so often, when I re-watch a movie, I respond to it completely differently from the last time. A film you loved twenty years ago has you scratching your head and saying, "WHAT was I thinking." And a film you detested can take on a positive new light for reasons that you can't even begin to put your finger on. You may even find that you go back and forth with a given film to the extent that you begin to realize that subjective commentary may be the ONLY truly honest commentary.Case in point, Fred Zinneman's 1977 film JULIA. There was a time when I was very ambivalent (and really mostly negative) about this movie. It seemed to be an exercise in earnestness, kind of "special project" movie that the relatively recently politicized Jane Fonda undertook so frequently in the 1970s. Actually, though, I found that the political story worked pretty well. The subplot about Lillian's struggles to establish herself as a playwright nearly drove me up the wall, precisely for the reasons that others have detailed here. The scenes of her chainsmoking, tearing her hair--and actually throwing the typewriter out the window (try doing that with your computer these days) virtually SCREAMED "serious writer at work." When I watched this film in my 20s, I wasn't very patient with what I felt were cinematic cliches.When I watched the film again recently, I found that these scenes didn't bother me half as much as they had back then. It may well be it's because I've seen hundreds of films in the interim and have come to realize that there is a kind of "cinematic shorthand" (a much friendlier term than "cinematic cliche, wouldn't you say?) that has always been employed (whether you're talking about images of the hands of clock speeding by--or calendar pages being torn off--or something as basic as a voiceover, a device central to the film JULIA). I seem to have grown a lot more patient with such cinematic conventions over the years. And in the case of JULIA, I have actually started to see the typewriter throwing as further possible evidence of a self-mythologizing tendency on the part of Lillian Hellman, the author of the film's source material, the "memoir" PENTIMENTO.Mary McCarthy has been widely quoted as having said that every word that Lillian Hellman ever wrote was "a lie, including 'the' and 'and.' I don't know enough about Hellman or McCarthy to comment extensively. But the film, perhaps inadvertantly, raises a lot of interesting questions about the very nature of what a memoir is, or a film biography. If Lillian Hellman sought self-aggrandizement, which seems likely, does she also not touch on some very real truths about the nature of courage and heroism. And in the end, doesn't she (or maybe don't the filmmakers) tell a pretty good story?Take it with a grain--or a shaker--of salt. Put some of it on your popcorn. And enjoy a remarkable story about two remarkable women. In this po-mo world, we're becoming used to taking every tale as a fiction. When it's told with good acting, good direction, good cinematography, and, yes, mostly good writing, it's pretty easy to take a few "lies" with the truth, the chaff with the wheat, and to still take a few lessons from the process.