Slipping in under the fog of a quiet release due to some unfounded legal ramifications regarding plagiarism, Effie Gray is the latest assault from Dakota Fanning’s agent to get us all to take her seriously as an adult. What we end up getting instead is another reminder of how great Emma Thompson is, and why it’s such a shame she isn’t in better movies more often.
Based on the true story of the loveless marriage between entitled art critic John Ruskin (Greg Wise) and his emotionally suffocating young wife Effie Gray (Fanning), we get a fantastically realised look at how marriage was back in the day, the kind of You’ll-Get-Used-To-It mentality of finding yourself stuck with someone you barely know for the rest of your life. When Gray’s eye begins to wander towards to handsome and passionate Everrett Millais (Tom Sturridge), it causes something of a scandal.
There’s also Julie Walters, Robbie Coltrane and Derek Jacobi, all obviously lured back into an old-school high buttoned waistcoat or corset by the thoughts of working with Thompson, who also wrote the screenplay as well as supplying most of the movie’s energy as one of the more lively supporting characters. Having starred in some Oscar-baiting period romance dramas already (Howard’s End, Remains Of The Day, Sense & Sensibility), she knows how these things are put together, but unfortunately director Richard Laxton doesn’t quite have the same handle on proceedings.
The setting is perfectly captured, and things all look rather lovely, but there’s a sense of dramatic inertia as the mostly passive Gray is left wandering dead-eyed from room to stately room, looking for someone to leave the gilded cage door open so she can fly free. At 19 years of age, Fanning has found herself in a no-man’s-land between our memories of the little blonde sprite from Man On Fire and the adult-situations of The Runaways. That agent of hers is going to have to try harder than this if we’re expected to find Fanning’s grown-up acting career to be anything close to memorable.
As for Effie Gray, a movie dealing with a passionate affair remaining oddly passionless is a cinematic cardinal sin, and much like Gray herself, we’re left looking at something pretty, but feeling rather loveless about it.
