Julia

Woah.  Wow.

This was a really good movie.  I just didn't know what I was getting into.  It turns out this particular film was a biggie for it's time.  It was nominated for 8 Academy Awards and took home the fame and glory for Best Screen Play as well as Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress.  Jane Fonda was robed.  Vanessa Redgrave was a wildfire and deserved hers.  They were both so flipping beautiful!  Why did no one warn me?  I mean look:

The film is an adaptation from Lillian Hellman's autobiographical story "Julia."  The story and the film revolve around her close friendship with Julia and their growth in to adulthood along with their respective choices in the face of burgeoning fascism in Europe pre-World War II.  The story also addresses Lillian Hellman's creation of her first play, the Children's Hour as well as the beginning of her 30 year affair with Dashiell Hammett, god-farther of the detective novel genre.  Hellman is portrayed as a temperamental, Johnny Walker drinking, cigarette smoking, aspiring writer.  She yell, throws fits, is determined and eventually drops everything and risks everything to help an old friend.  Brave to the point of foolish... or possibly the other way around.

This is an intense story with an even more intense ending.  These women and the young actresses that played their younger selves did a remarkable job drawing me into their profoundly intimate friendship.  Add in the fact that this is Lillian Hellman's flipping story and every scene that had Fonda & Redgrave in it was just rife rife rife with lady loving subtext.  The intensity of their connection was just plain palpable.  Which made the 4 minutes Meryl actually had on screen that much more important.  Because I hated her.

Ok, hate is a strong word.  Maybe really disliked her.  A lot.  And I was supposed to.  She played Anne Marie, a woman who knew both Julia and Lillian and was portrayed as a smarmy, condescending, superficial beeotch.   4 tiny little minutes and I was all, "You leave Lillian alone.  You don't know shit about Julia!"  Plus the brunette look was just so alien.

Later on in the movie it's intimated that her character/the person she was based on in real life was a total whack job that seduced her brother when she was 16.  Not the kind of person one wants to be buddies with to begin with.

At anyrate.  This film blew me a way a little.  No doubt because I'm not doing my homework going into any of these for fear of backing out before I really begin.  It's a small part in a movie important to it's time and a good feather to get in her cap early.

If you've ever done time as a writer in any fashion there was one scene I found particularly cathartic.  Lillian/Jane Fonda is hammering away on a type-writer that seems to be falling apart, so what does she do?  She chucks it out the window:

But she's still pissed:

Yeah, that face right there says everything about writing.  It sucks and you can't stop.