Effie Gray is a Victorian drama that co-stars Emma Thompson (she wrote the screenplay as well) so duh of course I watched it. Like I wouldn’t watch a movie with Victorian dresses and Emma Thompson saying clever things.

Effie Gray is a lovely film – subtle, quietly but deeply empowering, and visually lovely. However, it’s so very subtle and quiet and calm that I was gravely tempted to make it a double feature with Furious 7 just so I could wake up.

Effie Gray is loosely based on the true story of Euphemia (Effie) Gray, who married the famous art critic John Ruskin in 1848. For details of the true story, the Wikipedia entries on Effie and on John Ruskin are packed with Victorian gossip and drama and repressed sexuality. Spoilers for the movie, obviously.

Anyway, Movie Version Effie marries Movie Version John Ruskin and goes to live with him and his parents at their home. We know things are going to go horribly for poor Effie when she gets in the carriage after the wedding and John tells her to close her eyes. “Perfect,” he says, viewing her silent face, and it’s just like a horror film when the door creaks slowly open while a chainsaw revs up in the distance. You just want to drag her ass out of the carriage right that second.

Effie does not see this as a bad sign, although she is non-plussed to discover that when she meets John’s parents, his mother immediately drags him off to give him a bath. Effie quickly learns that she is not to engage in any domestic activities, she is not to help John in his work or be near him when he is working, she is not to wear pink, she is not to touch her mother-in-law’s flowers, and evidentially she is not to have either sex or children, since John is so horrified by the sight of her naked body on their wedding night that he refuses to touch her from that moment forward. She can go to social events without John, but his permission looks less like an acknowledgement that they enjoy different things and more like indifference combined with condemnation, and it becomes clear to Effie that if she has a social life away from her husband her own reputation will suffer.

Luckily, Effie has one friend, the reliably sensible and delightful Emma Thompson, whose time on screen is all too short. She also gets a timely visit from a Victorian doctor. Never before and probably never in the future will I feel so incredibly fond of a male Victorian doctor in a feminist Victorian movie. Just as I was sure he’d declare that Effie was hysterical and should have her uterus removed, he prescribed a common sense regimen of fresh air, good food, and some attention from her husband, who didn’t even notice that her hair was falling out from stress. The doctor interrupting John to tell him off was a deeply satisfying moment. He also tells Effie to stop drinking the tonic provided by John’s mother – it seems that MiL has been drugging Effie into constant lethargy and intermittent hallucinations (oh, that Victorian laudanum!).

On the doctor’s advice, John takes Effie to Scotland, and he also takes along his cute, single, young, male protégé, who is horrified by the way John treats Effie. Cue romance.

 

Let’s just get this out of the way – yes, the clothes are great, and in several scenes they are crucial to the story. Much like people who only watch action movies for the explosions, I’ve become one of those people who watches period dramas just for the clothes, and this one did not disappoint. Elyse, you’ll be receiving my wish list of knitted things shortly so best clear your calendar.

 

 

The clothes do not serve merely as fodder with which I shall torture Elyse for months (KNIT, EYLSE! GO, GO, GO!). In a movie in which no one can voice his or her thoughts, appearance is important. Effie becomes so stressed that her hair falls out in patches, and who notices, and when, and her decision to hide it versus reveal it, all mark major turning points in the characters’ arcs. Similarly, Effie wears her hair down well into her married life, and we can tell that she has utterly succumbed to depression and lost all hope of having a happy marriage when she starts wearing it up.

In a movie which is largely about sex, her nightgowns deserve their own credits – and of course we have a devastating but under-played scene in which Effie is told to change out of a light pink frock with flowers to a dark green satin thing which is gorgeous but must weight 100 pounds and is completely at odds with Effie’s natural light, cheerful style.

 

The strange thing about the movie is that it ends just as all the dynamic real-life drama would have kicked in. On the other hand, the lack of major drama is kind of the point. Effie has completely conventional goals – she wants to marry a man who she both loves and who her family approves of, and have babies, and manage her own house. She’s not trying to storm the barricades of feminism. She’s totally un-equipped to deal with a parade of disappointments and heartbreak (the fact that she married for love is terrible, because she believed her love was returned and it quite clearly is not). She lacks the material and emotional resources to stand up to her in-laws, and even when away from her in-laws she has to accept that John is completely indifferent to her. She tries seeking independent happiness since John is not opposed to her going to balls and such alone, but she pays such a price for this that she gives it up and sinks into a profound depression.

She’s very passive – I kept wanting to yell at her to go live with her mother since John would barely notice – or go visit Emma and get a handy list of Socially Acceptable Things For Bored Wives To Do. When she finally takes control of her life, she does it as quietly as she does everything else. When she’s triumphant, she’s quietly triumphant – but her triumph shines right through her and casts a brilliant light.

The movie is so quiet that it risks being dragged into dullness (the trailer is a little misleading, since it suggests that Effie spends the film screaming her head off, which…no). How I longed for Effie to yell, scream, rip the clothes off cute young painter guy, break shit, join the suffragettes. It’s essentially a movie about the lethal nature of boredom. It avoids being boring itself largely because of the actors’ commitments. Dakota Fanning, who has been acting since she was five, need have no fears for her acting career as an adult. The movie is almost entirely from her point of view and she has to carry it. One of the movie’s missteps is in not giving the viewer a clear sense of how much time has passed (in real life, her marriage to Ruskin lasted for five years).   Luckily Fanning is a good enough actress that her face carries the movie. It becomes steadily less animated, more lined, more sunken – until it begins to harden in resolve and then shine in triumph.

 

 

Greg Wise (who, incidentally, is married to Emma Thompson) plays Ruskin as an epic jerk, but also a man who is ferociously intelligent and charismatic. Cute painter guy, Everett Millais, is played by Tom Sturridge, who looks so much like Kit Harington that I spent the whole movie muttering, “You know nothing, Everett.” Sturridge’s job is to look gorgeous and sensitive and he’s great at it. All of the actors show great commitment to the material. They seem to live in that place and time. They wear their clothes naturally and speak naturally. They don’t hog the screen – it’s Effie’s story and the scenes belong to her (OK, except for when Emma Thompson is on screen, which I suspect is why her screen time is very limited). This means that all the characters other than Effie are very undeveloped, which keeps the focus on Effie but takes some dimension out of the story.

Ultimately this is a deeply empowering movie, although my bloodthirsty soul longed for just one rocket launcher.   Because the movie ends where it does, we are left in some doubt about Effie’s future (unless we read the Wikipedia articles). However, I think that the uncertainty is there because Effie has saved herself by taking action (no, I won’t tell you what the action is) even if the action doesn’t have the desired effect. She spends most of the movie quite passive; in fact, she spends a lot of it hopped up on “healing tonics” and flopping about in bed. In finally taking a step, a concrete, proactive step towards her own liberation, she makes it clear that she owns her own destiny. Even if her action fails, she will not be taking to her bed again unless hot painter guy is in it. She gives no fucks. And in the end, a rocket launcher would be redundant – and if you really need one, I think I saw one in the Furious 7 trailer.

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Effie Gray is in theatres now, and you can find tickets (US) at Fandango and Moviefone.