Being Julia (2004)

Image credit: Being Julia: Alex Dukay

DARLING, I FORGIVE YOU FOR 'MARS ATTACKS' Bening stuns as a theatrical grande dame in full bloom

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Being Julia

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When I think back to The Grifters, the image that comes to mind is Annette Bening's face sparkling. She played a hip-twitching femme fatale, but her duplicity wasn't just clever and sexy — it had joie de vivre. Bening enjoyed a couple of other good roles (Bugsy, Richard III), but in movies like The American President and American Beauty you could feel her reining herself in. Her presence grew domesticated and a bit lackluster. It was tempting, if not necessarily fair, to say that her highly publicized role as the Woman Who Tamed Warren Beatty had robbed her of that luscious sparkle. Now, at last, she's got it back. In the puckishly contrived Being Julia, based on W. Somerset Maugham's Theatre, Bening is cast as a celebrated British stage performer of the 1930s who is always acting, even when she thinks that she's being sincere, and Bening once again makes duplicity look electric.

Adored by the public, revered by the critics, Bening's Julia Lambert appears nightly in popular plays at the ritzy West End theater managed by her impresario husband (Jeremy Irons), a benign Svengali who knows just how to pamper and cajole the best out of her. Julia lacks for nothing, but she's getting on a bit — the lines in her face can't lie — and when she lets herself be seduced by Tom Fennell (Shaun Evans), a dashingly shallow American social climber who looks to be half her age, we assume that she's using the bedroom romp to recharge her batteries. The affair, instead, becomes pure melodrama — a scandal-lite tempest of amour and jealousy, with Julia improvising an elaborate scheme to ensnare and punish Avice Crichton (Lucy Punch), the pretty young actress who has become her rival.

Julia, you see, has manufactured the entire brouhaha (without quite being aware of it). She convinces herself that she's in love with a foolish cad in order to fuel the tempestuous glory of her onstage art. It's no longer unusual to see an American actress who can play believably in a British period piece, but Bening does something delectable and rare: She makes Julia a baroque drama queen, bursting into rooms in a flutter of flamboyant wordplay, yet she grounds the character in an earthy American sensuality. Julia is haughty but not superficial, flip without being a flibbertigibbet. Being Julia flirts too heavily with soap opera clichés, but it has enough surprises to keep you guessing, and for Annette Bening it's the liveliest of comebacks.