Julia
Heilman’s memoir of love delicately crafted
Julia is a story of two friend
ships, is a movie concerned with
distances, is a beautifully-crafted,
unsettling film experience.
... the boat is no longer on the
open sea..
Simple drumbeats in darkness.
A slight pause of silence, then
chamber music so loud it startles,
bringing on the title and opening
credits. A simple technique, it an
nounces one of many conflicting
opposites that comprise the
rhythm and tempo of Fred
Zinneman’s film of a Lillian Hell
man memoir. Delicate balances of
such conflicts hold and move this
film.
A painterly shot of a lone figure
fishing on a lake from a rowboat
dose to shore, blued with dawn, or
distance in time. A voice — Jane
Fonda’s Lillian — admits the falli
bility of her memory save on a
single dear subject: Julia
‘‘I am old now and want to re
member what was there for me
then, what is there for me now.”
We see an old woman's eyes gaz
ing through the fishing scene, but
they do not see us: they are cast
ing their gaze towards a past we
are told is true.
“Memory, like a poet, lies so
that we may focus on what mat
tered." Though written concerning
Eugene O'Neill, that same tension
r
and less time for play-going and
love-affairs: Julia is increasingly
concerned with ideas, liberty, op
portunity for the disenfranchised.
This brings her finally in open bat
tle with the cancer of European
1
By ERIC WURZBACHER
resides in Julia. Director Zinne
man and screenwriter Alvin
Sargent have focused on the es
sentials of Heilman's poetic
sketch, with the result being an
expansion on the original.
“I didn’t know much more about
Julia than you do, assuming
you've read the story,” Sargent
told one interviewer. “But not
knowing maybe even worked for
me. Julia was a memory, an idea.”
The portrayal of Julia given us in
the film is just that. We see a girl
grow into a woman of intellectual
and moral passion who has less
fascism in the 1930s.
Despite the film’s title, however,
Julia is Lillian's story about Lillian
growing into the Lillian that re
members, for us, that story. Zin
neman has managed to balance
both of Lillian’s loves so that the
love of two women exists along
side that of man (writer Dashell
Hammett as played by Jason
Robards) and woman.
Indeed, they represent the two
aspects of Lillian’s conflict that Zin
neman sees as the central issue
of the story: both are mentors to
Lillian, both are essential to her life
and growth, both steer her to
wards what they see as her own
good without forcing her into it. By
this, Zinneman avoids making
either a feminist or sexist state
ment, and instead gives us a work
of art about friendship, a non
political work about the polariza
tion that is politics.
There is little doubt that Lillian
understands Dash, however frus
trated she seems to become with
him. One wonders (as does Julia
several times): does she under
stand Julia’s consuming pas
sions, or Julia herself, at all?
In the hospital where Julia lies
inert and battered, Lillian drifts into
sleep and a dream, of the two of
them sailing on a lake. Julia cap
tains the boat, takes care of Lillian
as always when they are together.
Much later in the film, when they
reunite in Berlin, Julia's distance is
nearly complete. Once more she
takes control, runs the show,
those wide blue eyes somewhere
else.
Lillian, though, has changed,
and Zinneman shows us this as
she boards the train from Berlin:
she looks back at the nameless
man who has seen her safely
aboard the train, a man she will
never see again who has risked
his life to help her to work against
Hitler even as Julia does.
Yet she does this without aban
doning her own commitment to
writing: she begins to see her writ
ing within a larger context. The
central conflict remains, as it must
for any creative individual, but
now incorporated within her
rather than between two exemp
lars of mutually exclusive ways.
The delicate balance is main
tained.
"I remember them both,”
muses the older Lillian s voice at
film's end as we are returned to
the opening scene on the lake.
There is a note of quiet triumph in
the statement. Friends die,
memories alter, love clarifies.
Though never at the tiller during
her own story, she is the one tel
ling that story, finally in control.
Like all good stories, it grows with
the telling, revealing more, as
does the film with each viewing.
Go see it with a friend or two.
Coma
Directors perspective cant cure flatness
Coma is a film so overloaded
with commercial qualities — a
strong, or at least central, woman
character, a trace of science fic
tion, several chase scenes, and
even some superficial social
commentary—that it seems more
like a package than a film. This
may be just as well since, as film
entertainment, particularly as a
mystery-thriller, Coma is curiously
fiat, predictable, and unexciting.
Much of the blame for the film’s
flatness must surely be placed on
screenwriter-director Michael
Crichton (Westworld), a licensed
physician and best-selling
novelist (The Andromeda Strain).
Crichton's medical credentials are
no asset to his direction of Coma
since almost all the film’s action
takes place in a hospital. In theory,
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the eye of an insider should give
the film a good feel for its setting,
but a hospital is one place where
the doctor’s perspective is vastly
different from that of the patient;
one works there all the time, while
the other is there only for birth,
death, and other, only slightly less
traumatic events. As a result,
Coma’s solemn matter-of-fact
view of hospital life seems remote
and even irrelevant to the
audience’s experiences.
Equally detached from the
audience's perspective are the
operating room mishaps in Coma.
While everyone who faces even a
minor operation has some fears of
a fatal mishap, Coma focuses
those fears, on the possibility, not
of surgeon incompetence, but of
malice. By implicitly displacing the
(plausible) risk of accident with the
(implausible) possibility of homic
idal conspiracy, Coma offers un
convincing assurance that doc
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tors do, in fact, know what they are
doing.
Crichton’s literary success,
based primarily on his ability to
craft suspenseful stories, is also
irrelevant to his direction of Coma,
where he consistently fails to de
velop or maintain suspense or au
dience involvement. Even the
film’s central character is so per
functorily sketched that, from an
opening lover’s quarrel to a final
humorous implications of an
organ auction are lost when the
sequence is treated merely as a
distraction from an interminable
chase sequence; not even
Elizabeth Ashley's grotesque
seriousness as the auctioneer can
compensate for the film’s cursory
and ineffective handling of the se
quence.
The heart of Coma is its treat
ment of the great American pas
By DAVID COURSEN
trip to the operating room, she re
mains almost completely inscrut
able, even as we are asked to
identify with her.
The film is, in fact, poorly
crafted. A hackneyed romantic in
terlude is presented with virtually
no unsettling overtones, as if the
woman could forget her suspi
cions of the man, as well as the
assorted creepy events she has
witnessed in the preceding hour of
screen time. A similar changing
of-the-rules occurs when a hired
killer, told to make one killing "look
like an accident,” uses a gun to
stalk a second victim, as if hospital
authorities might mistake a fatal
shooting for a case of “accidental
lead poisoning.”
The film is also damaged by di
rector Crichton’s lack of a sense of
humor. Even several visual gags
with cadavers are undercut by the
non-human appearance of the
props. Similarly, the blackly
time of paranoia, and here, too,
Crichton’s dull direction causes
problems. A woman’s belief that a
whole hospital staff may be part of
a murderous conspiracy, or that
men are pursuing her in the night,
is straightforwardly presented
with no humorous overtones. No
thing much is made of the prob
lems and ironies of distinguishing
real and imagined persecutors.
The mechanical qualities in
Crichton’s direction are perhaps
most apparent in the resolution of
the “surprise ending,” a surprise
only because Crichton has
cheated in several earlier se
quences.
Finally, what defines Coma is
not so much its dullness as its cyn
ical contempt for its audience.
Crichton evidently feels that, with
enough commercial “hooks,” a
film can dispense with details like
a suspenseful, coherent story
line, consistent characterizations,
or visual imagination.
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