**Spoiler Alert**
Director: Richard Laxton/Starring: Dakota Fanning, Emma Thompson, Greg Wise, Claudia Cardinale, Derek Jacobi, Julie Walters, Tom Sturridge, Robbie Coltrane, David Suchet and James Fox
Effie Gray, the one-time wife of 19th century eminent British art critic and author John Ruskin, is the subject of Richard Laxton's film, which might make a suitable companion piece to Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh's recent J.W. Turner biopic. Both men were contemporaries and Ruskin is credited for championing Turner's work. But the most conspicuous similarity between the two were their troubled relationships with women. While Turner experiences with the fairer sex were often tempestuous, Ruskin remained emotionally detached and almost cruel in his relationship with Effie Gray, as Laxton's film attests.
Laxton's film on Ruskin's suffering wife tells her story while illuminating the less flattering aspects of her husband's private life and his disturbingly odd relationship with his parents.
In an early scene, we see Effie Gray (Dakota Fanning) and John Ruskin (Greg Wise) in their post-nuptial ride to the Ruskin residence, where John shares a home with his parents; Margaret (Julie Walters) and his father, the elder John (David Suchet). In a moment that foreshadows the troubles to come, Effie presents herself to John in their wedding night bedchamber, only to be looked upon with disgust.
Ignoring her husband's odd behavior, Effie makes at attempt at being a useful, dutiful wife by assuming a role as amanuensis to John; only to be scolded by her mother-in-law. Margaret's harsh, dismissive rebuke sends a clear message to Effie that her help is neither adequate nor needed. Disparaged and feeling the crushing ennui of domestic idleness, Effie makes another attempt at being a homemaker. She deliberately rips one of John's shirts to provide herself an opportunity to mend it; a desperate effort that earns the maid's scorn, who treats Effie like an impertinent child. Unloved by her husband and denied any meaningful involvement in domestic affairs, Effie begins to feel the Ruskin home's noxious effects.
Compounding her misery are John's parents, who become increasingly cold to Effie while displaying a strange, neurotic over-protectiveness of their son.
Feeling stifled by her in-laws and virtually ignored by her husband, Effie finds herself subject to other oppressive behavior, this time at a dinner hosted in the Ruskin home for artists and intellectuals. During a dinner table debate, Effie asks a question of her husband, who stands before the mostly male gathering in a professorial manner. Her question is met with silent disdain--the severest her husband's as she abashedly resumes her silence. But a guest, Lady Eastlake (Emma Thompson), wife of the powerful art patron Sir Charles Eastlake (James Fox), comes to her rescue; complimenting Effie for her intelligence and perspicacity. The two take to one another which prompts Lady Eastlake to suggest the Ruskins host she and her husband for dinner.
In the interim, Effie is subjected to Margaret Ruskin's dubious attentions. Her mother-in-law begins to prescribe a strange, possibly harmful concoction of her own design for Effie's worsening mental and physical condition. The physical and mental toll the Ruskin family exacts on Effie leaves her feeling ill; a possible psycho-somatic affliction that Lady Eastlake recognizes when she and her husband arrive for dinner. Sensitive to the Ruskin home's ill-effects on Effie, Lady Eastlake becomes the young woman's sympathetic ally.
And as Effie's unhappiness continues, she begins to notice John's odd refusal to consummate their marriage and his tendency to self-stimulate; a disquieting, near-ascetic idiosyncrasy that contributes to the marriage's toxicity.
Though John Ruskin is a key figure in the story and a personality of scholarly fame, it is Effie's resilience and integrity that is the real focus. We feel the weight of Victorian social strictures on Effie Gray as life with her husband and the elder Ruskins become unbearable. It is made all the more difficult when a painter in John's artistic circle, Everett Millais, falls in love with Effie, which incurs her husband's scorn and jealous suspicion. Learning that divorce is an arduous pursuit for any woman in Victorian England, Effie pursues it nevertheless, which proves to be a significant turning point in her life.
Fanning, hardly an obvious choice to play Effie Gray, handles the role with assurance, allowing her ferociously innocent face to mask a steely resolve. Greg Wise--the memorably villainous Willoughby in Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, makes Ruskin a callous but pitiable figure and executes his performance well. As John was a pawn to his parents, whose draconian methods of child-rearing contributed both to his success and to his unhealthy regard for women, Wise shows us a man of towering intellect and frail psyche.
Laxton, a television veteran, shows patience with the material, never hurrying Effie's story along. Some lovely pans and wide-shots of Scottish highlands and lochs share screen-time with interiors refreshingly shorn of the Masterpiece Theater aesthetic to which some Victorian period pieces are sometimes prey.
Thompson is an accomplished script-scribe, having won an Oscar for her adaptation of Jane Austen, and again demonstrates her writerly acumen with a tight, original story with terrific dialogue and historical fidelity.
Effie Gray is nothing astonishing but it is well done and stimulating in its own, modest way. It doesn't sentimentalize Gray's story nor does it render her a martyr. I liked the film but won't rhapsodize over it.
