Streep at 60: Julia (1977)

Streep at 60: A Retrospective Series
This post is dedicated to Derek who has asked me to write about this movie for two years. What can I say, I'm slow.

Julia (1977) Directed by Fred Zinneman. Starring: Jane Fonda, Vanessa
Redgrave, Jason Robards and way down in the cast list... Meryl Streep

Imagine you're the casting director for a prestige piece about hotheaded playwright Lillian Hellman and her (fictional) friend Julia, a wealthy anti-fascist who puts her life on the line to save Jews in 193os Germany. Lillian, the chainsmoking Jewess, is described early in the film like so:

You're scrappy. You are the neighborhood bulldog except for your goddamn dream of being a cocker spaniel.

You have to have Meryl Streep for the role, don't you? Bulldog and cockerspaniel it is. We're talking about the cinema's most acclaimed chameleon. Or maybe you had Meryl in mind for the impassioned title character, whom the film repeatedly asks you to idolize. That'd work to.

But I've forgotten a crucial piece of information! It's 1976 when you're casting this and virtually no one outside of the NYC's theatrical community knows who 27 year-old Meryl Streep is. She was making her name as a powerhouse stage actress but mainstream stardom wasn't yet a reality. Julia was a prestige actress showcase and you go the only place you're likely to go in the mid 70s: to Faye Dunaway (it's a no) and then to Oscar winning superstar Jane Fonda (as Lillian) and three time nominee Vanessa Redgrave (as Julia).

No, Streep would begin her legendary film stardom in a character role, unheralded by worshipful narration or a careful spotlight. She would begin her film career in a crowd scene at Sardi's.

Meryl's celluloid arrival. She waves to the camera (i.e. Jane Fonda) and
begins applauding with the extras. P.S. She's not an extra.

There she is!

Sardi's it is. Streep the Star isn't on the wall yet but it's only a matter of time. The actress doesn't waste a second of her limited screentime. In a scene that's meant to be about Lillian's acclimation to her sudden fame (she'd just written The Children's Hour we presume? The film is not big on details) the restaurant is filled with strangers. Anne Marie (Streep) grabs Lillian straightaway and makes with the niceties, letting us and the author's more anonymous well wishers know that the two are "friends". Streep's Anne is starchly perturbed when the camera pans away from her stage right, taking Fonda's Lillian and thus the film with her.

One of cinema's most famous WASPY blondes began her film career as
a brunette in a movie about a famous Jew.

Fred Zinneman's direction dwells just enough on this disturbance of familiarity that one assumes that Anne Marie will return. She will.

The first forty minutes of Julia are an awkward mix of writer's drama, historical suspense and fictionalized biopic. We toggle between Lillian angrily typing, chain smoking and doubting her talent to flashbacks of her friendship with Julia to scenes of escalating violence and unrest in Europe. Lillian loses track of Julia when she disappears from a hospital bed after a mysterious surgery and when Lillian returns to America, her fame begins.

Once we've hit Sardi's the film begins to constrict into something more manageable and successful, a pre-war drama. But the messy Oscar-winning screenplay, adapted from Hellman's "memoirs" Pentimento, seems to have more on its mind than it can include. Case in point: Anne Marie.

Lillian makes time to see her before leaving for Moscow (she hopes to find Julia en route) and the scene is rich with bitchy subtext. Anne Marie casually slips in repeated digs at the political and the philanthropic. But Meryl, never one to leave a character with but one personality trait, also suggests that Anne Marie does actually care about both Lillian and Julia. She just doesn't understand them. And, here's the perceptive kicker: she really doesn't want to. After a hint of shared history and warmth, she exits the scene just as she enters it, underlining her political apathy.

Imagine Russia. My god, of all places.

There's another scene late in the film with Anne Marie's brother (John Glover) that seems to have a whole other film playing in it head. It's a film about the privileged classes and their sexual sophistication that stars... well, what do you know, Anne Marie herself. Her presence in Julia's narrative is never quite justified so there's the distinct sense that she's a much more pivotal character in the novel that they couldn't quite figure out how to include or omit.

At least the Anne Marie business is welcome color in the sometimes monotonous Lillian story, but there's really no excuse for the repetitive sequences featuring Hellman's life with Dashiell Hammett. Jason Robards inexplicably won the Oscar for playing the famous writer. It's not that the performance isn't good... it's that the character is largely irrelevant. There's a lot going on in the very uneven Julia but in the rare moments wherein the movie is allowed access to the elusive Julia herself, it's on a different level entirely.

Jane Fonda isn't utilized all that well as Lillian -- it's hard to dramatize writing and the film stumbles as so many others have in this department -- but in the case of Vanessa Redgrave, the casting reaped major rewards. We're not just talking about the gold statues they pass out in Hollywood. Consider the amount of star charisma and actorly confidence you would need to seize the screen when the dialogue describing you as you walk into frame is this ripely adoring:

There are women who reach a perfect time of life when the face will never again be as good, the body never as graceful, as powerful. It had happened that year to Julia.

Vanessa Redgrave was 40 when Julia arrived and though her powers to bewitch the camera have never exactly waned in the years since, it's easy to believe Lillian's awestruck voiceover proclamation. Today, Julia is best remembered as an pivotal moment in Vanessa Redgrave's filmography and that's a just legacy. She's its sole claim to greatness. Even an actor less gifted than Redgrave might have won gold in the title role: the movie fawns on the character and where movies fawn, awards often follow. But Redgrave continually elevates the movie that is so eager to put her on a pedestal. When it speaks of her beauty and grace she doesn't empty out her face as so many actors do when a movie requires them to become an abstract vessell for the audience. Instead, she lets a goofy sideways grin flash. When Jane Fonda works the traditional tears and drama in the film's climax, Redgrave refuses the sentiment of the scene repeatedly. Throughout the movie she seems a little wild eyed. Redgrave understands that it takes more than just Goodness to fling yourself into martyrdom the way Julia does. You need a bit of madness for that level of commitment.

Even in moments of affection, Julia has an agenda.
There's no time for sentiment.

Redgrave had reached the perfect time of stardom. The Oscar happened that year for Julia. Streep would have to wait. But not for long.

~

Julia neatly predicted Streep's future role as Oscar bait extraordinaire. For the first three consecutive years of her movie career she appeared in Best Picture nominees and winners: The Deer Hunter and Kramer Vs. Kramer won the top prize. Julia was the leader of its Oscar pack with 11 nominations though it lost to Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Julia is the sole Best Picture nominee of 1977 that feels like a traditional Oscar choice: it's big, important, historical, well meaning. But, as is so often the case, those qualities don't automatically equal scintillating cinema. It's arguably the weakest member of 1977's shortlist: Star Wars and Annie Hall are bonafide classics, The Goodbye Girl and The Turning Point have detractors but they have a certain respectable honesty about what they are (aggressive comedy and histrionic melodrama, respectively). But I'm being too hard on the film that gave Vanessa Redgrave an entrancing showcase and introduced moviegoers to Meryl Streep. It delivered spectacularly on those two counts.