![]() ‘Effie Gray’ features a solid-enough performance from lead actress Dakota Fanning, but its pacing is ponderous and frustratingly slow. Overall, there are a fair amount of mostly vague conversations about sex and its place in a marriage, but only a couple of scenes of actual sexual content and nudity. The film is about the terrible marriage between Victorian-era art critic John Ruskin and his abused young bride, the titular Effie Gray, so there is a lot of verbal abuse, calling her a “harlot,” “wicked,” and making suggestions about her sexual experience the suggestion of a man masturbating under bedsheets an attempted sexual assault some strange imagery brought on by drug addiction an inspection of Gray’s privates to check whether she is virgin and a nude man bathing and walking around in the distance, with his behind visible. Given all the trouble it took to get this story to the screen, it hardly seems worth the bother.Age Appropriate For: 14+. ![]() And the cast is filled with familiar faces, though mostly in little more than glorified cameos-Claudia Cardinale, Derek Jacobi, Robbie Coltrane, James Fox. The production, which includes sequences in Vienna and the wilds of Scotland, is quite handsome. Even taken at face value, this version simply recycles clichés about Victorian repression. Thompson seems to have intended a feminist parable, but it’s hard to believe she couldn’t have come up with a better vehicle. ![]() It’s equally as plausible, but no more authoritative than the popular version. The recent book Marriage of Inconvenience by Robert Brownell builds a rather different case in which Ruskin refused to consummate the marriage because he discovered that Effie did not love him and only married him to settle her father’s debts. The conventional understanding of Ruskin’s non-consummation is that he was appalled by the sight of his bride’s pubic hair, which seems awfully unlikely. A story like this is unlikely to leave a primary paper trail, and it’s never hard to sell a salacious interpretation. It is only when her husband’s protégé, the young painter John Everett Millais (Tom Sturridge) comes to paint his portrait, that she is roused to find a way out of her situation.Ĭomplaining about historical inaccuracies in movies based on fact is a losing game, especially when historians can’t agree on what did and did not happen. Travel, to which the Ruskins are addicted, brings no relief. Her intellect is clearly not on a level with his, and he shows no inclination to develop it. John is content to spend his days ruminating and writing. The 20-year-old Effie finds herself mired in the most stifling conception of Victorian propriety. Expecting to make a home and raise a family with her eminent and wealthy new husband (played by Greg Wise, Thompson’s own spouse), she is disappointed to find themselves under the thumbs of his parents (David Suchet, Julie Walters), from which John shows no inclination to stray. Thompson’s take is very much on the side of Effie, well played by Dakota Fanning. Turner, a biography of the painter whose greatest champion was Ruskin. In the meantime, we’ve seen Ruskin inexplicably portrayed as a lisping fop in Mike Leigh’s recent Mr. Filmed in 2011, its release was enjoined while Emma Thompson, who wrote and produced it, was sued by the writer of two other screenplays about the Ruskins’ marriage. So busy is the Ruskin industry, in fact, that Effie Gray, which opens at the Eastern Hills Cinema this Friday, had its release delayed for several years. Speculation into his disastrous marriage has been the subject of numerous plays, literary works, an opera, and several movies. Of course, that’s Ruskin’s story, or at least the version of it that has titillated the world since 1854. ![]() ![]() She has to stay with him and his dreadful parents for six years before she can get the marriage annulled on the rounds of impotence and remarry a man who gives her eight children in as many years. Little does she know that he’s a cold fish who would be so repulsed by the sight of her naked body on their wedding night that he would flee the bridal chamber, never to return. Who’d want to hear such a dull tale? Let me tell you this other story, about a young, dreamy-eyed girl, eager to get out of dreary Scotland and in love with a family friend 10 years older than herself. Hey, where are you going? Come back! I was just kidding! Ha ha. Pull up a chair and let’s chat about John Ruskin, the eminent Victorian art and social critic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |