In the movie, actor Greg Wise (Emma Thompson’s real-life husband) is actually 28 years older than Dakota Fanning, and looks more like her father than her husband.
In history, Effie was 19 he was 10 years her senior and something of a child-man himself. I guess this is understandable, since her original intentions remain unclear and the result is a failure on several different levels.įor one thing, the character of Ruskin never comes alive. Thompson appears so fed up with court battles that she has disowned the film opening this week in New York and refused to do any publicity connected with it. Plagued by two years of plagiarism lawsuits by other writers who tried unsuccessfully to bring the cinema-resistant story to the screen, Ms. Written by Emma Thompson, it’s literate and respectful, but a dose of lithium in a champagne glass that is too stolid to ever come alive.
Apparently the Victorian art world in the 1800s is not a subject that travels well.
#Effie gray movie movie
It’s a movie of dimly lit rooms and cloudy skies, so drab that even a journey to Venice looks mournful. She was weird from the start (born in the room where Ruskin’s grandfather committed suicide and soured on the trials of marriage by a mother who lost seven children in childbirth), and there are times when you wonder who was the most impotent-the priggish husband or the wooden, somnambulistic wife. Sumptuously mounted, the movie is slow as Christmas and so dull that even when she turned British society upside down by leaving Ruskin for his protégé, painter John Everett Millais (Tom Sturridge) and disgracing her husband with charges of impotency, Effie still shows no sign of sexual passion or a potentially happy future. Part of the fault lies with the ponderous direction by Richard Laxton.
Among the many miscast performers in a distinguished ensemble, Dakota Fanning plays the title role by moping her way through the movie with a bad Scottish accent that comes and goes, looking miserable and out of her element. The movie shows Effie as a trapped pre-Raphaelite who was victimized by a cold, indifferent husband and his domineering parents, often ill and drugged with sedatives. Ruskin’s disgust was clear from the first moment he saw Effie naked on their wedding night in 1848, and he never once touched her again, even in bed, during their sexless six-year marriage. The poor guy, you see, was impotent-a verboten subject that embarrassed polite society as well as the worlds of medicine, psychology and politics. Starring: Dakota Fanning, Greg Wise and Tom Sturridge
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