(dir: Richard Laxton) Effie Gray Ruskin Millais, one of the Pre-Raphaelite "muses", is best known for the infamous incident upon which her marriage to art-philosopher John Ruskin broke asunder: it was annulled after several years on grounds of non-consummation. Effie claimed that when she stripped off on her wedding night, Ruskin, raised on the smooth bodies of statues and classical paintings, was disgusted by her pubic hair. This is the salacious story which has survived, because it makes for stunningly good copy, and may or may not bear some truth. Probably it was one, but not the only, cause.
Ruskin, certainly one of the great thinkers of the Victorian era, as influential and well-regarded among the artists of his time as Belinsky was among the pre-Revolutionary Russian literati, has been harshly treated in recent years. First he was unfairly shunted aside as a ridiculous posturer in Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner, and here he is painted as a cruel, impotent freak and a mama's boy, his myriad gifts presented as a sort of whitewash behind which he hid his true, malformed nature. Even a cursory glance over Ruskin's work reveals a man of deep thought, numinous sensibility, and empathy for his fellow man. In Effie Gray, Greg Wise's Ruskin is pampered, self-involved, careless of the pain of others. Of course, the man as gleaned through his recorded words and the man in action are always two disparate beings, so where lies the truth?
In the End of the Tour, the David Foster Wallace character says, "I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the point that it makes it hard being around other people." Whether or not the real Wallace spoke it, it rings true when describing a human of genius, who will carry in his head a separate world, live inside a paradigm other than this dominant one we all, without thought, agree to call "reality", and the words may well apply to Ruskin. Because he approached art from a carefully preserved purity of perspective, and because he cared passionately to communicate his insights clearly, his writings inflamed his contemporaries with inspiration and helped to broaden the artistic world and hasten its evolution. He was not only a vociferous champion of Turner's, but opened the way for the much-maligned Pre-Raphaelites, whose influence largely rerouted the history of painting. He was a man with a calling; he followed it with zeal, and the path necessitated a self-imposed seclusion from the usual pleasures of society.
I do enjoy the Pre-Raphaelites, but mostly I love their WAGs. Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth, Gray, Maria Zambaco, Elizabeth Siddal. Their collective story is a fascinating one: they did a good deal of the suffering for the Pre-Raphaelites' art and got scant amounts of the credit for it. Effie Gray Ruskin Millais was never my favorite, but she leaves a path through the history books as a practical and talented woman, skilled in art herself, able to survive a public scandal and eke out a living as "help-meet" and muse to a genius, bearing him, I swear to God, eight children. Her household with Millais provided a solid fulcrum upon which the "Brotherhood" could swivel.
The movie is disingenuous from the beginning, painting Effie's family as poverty-stricken Scots snubbed by the Ruskins, wealthy Londoners. In fact, the families were both from Perth, and friendly; the Ruskins relocated to London for business reasons. Dakota Fanning's Effie is painted as a lonely, po-faced but good-hearted girl; in fact, she was a known flirt, under-educated, always vivacious and surrounded by suitors, and she initially laughed at the idea of marrying the stilted and bookish Ruskin. The current theory has it that she relented to save her father, who had lost his money in speculation, and Ruskin, although in love, was too scrupulous to make her sleep with him until she shared his feelings. It all sounds so, well, Victorian, but viewed within the parameters of the day, it is not an absurd idea. Later, while in Italy where Ruskin was writing his groundbreaking the Stones of Venice, Effie flirted and danced with Austrian officers, inspiring more than one duel and a scandal over missing diamonds, either stolen by or given to an admirer. In any case, the abyss between the couple's opposed temperaments was horribly apparent, and it appears that ending the marriage was initially Ruskin's idea. Annulment was preferred to divorce, in that he may have thought it could be kept reasonably private. He was wrong.
Regardless of all my historical objections, if the movie had been well-made, I'd be the first to love it. Emma Thompson's script, though, never comes much to life. Dakota Fanning's beauty is certainly the type the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood preferred, but she comes across as blank, lifeless, and unthinking. She shares no chemistry with Tom Sturridge's Millais, and when Emma Thompson as Lady Eastlake (the only lively performance in the film) takes an interest in her, there doesn't seem to be any reason for it.
IN SUMMARY: Quite beautiful, quite shallow, altogether unsatisfying.
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