Effie Gray - film review: 'Dakota Fanning is remarkably good but Emma Thompson’s script makes John Ruskin out to be a sexist villain '

It’s well scripted, efficiently directed, handsomely dressed and furnished, and vigorously acted. If you like historical drama, it delivers. But it is rewriting the past to fit current conceptions
Guiding light: Lady Eastlake (Emma Thompson, who also wrote the screenplay) befriends Effie (Dakota Fanning)
David Sexton10 October 2014

In April 1848, the brilliant art critic John Ruskin, then 29, married Effie Gray, 20. Their marriage lasted six years, before being annulled in 1854 on the grounds of non-consummation.

Effie went on to marry the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais in 1855 and had eight children with him. John Ruskin never married again and probably never had sex with anybody.

What happened on John and Effie’s disastrous wedding night remains obscure. Ruskin made a bizarre legal statement, saying: “Though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it.”

What could they have been? Some say it was just that she had pubic hair or underarm hair; others, including Suzanne Fagence Cooper in her recent biography of Effie Gray, have concluded that she was menstruating.

The story of this unhappy couple has been dramatised many times, from a 1912 silent film, The Love of John Ruskin, to the 2009 TV serial Desperate Romantics. Now Emma Thompson has made Effie the subject of her first original screenplay, restricting her drama to the marriage itself. She hasn’t dithered. Gladstone told his daughter: “Should you hear anyone blame Millais or his wife, or Mr Ruskin, remember that there is no fault; there was misfortune, even tragedy. All three were perfectly blameless.” This is not Thompson’s approach. Her film is a classic expression of Everyday Feminism.

Dakota Fanning is remarkably good as Effie, if not very Scottish; it’s more important that, being 20, she is the right age. We meet her playing with her sister in the woods near her Perthshire home, before leaving for London and marriage: “It’s going to be so exciting!”

In the train heading south, we meet her husband (Thompson’s, too, in real life), Greg Wise. He plays Ruskin as a sour, conceited and repressive villain, turning her face as though it were a work of art and saying: “Perfect!” Ruskin, by all accounts, had great charm but he has none here. Moreover, Wise is 48, not 29, one of those differences that can ever so subtly influence your sympathies.

They arrive in a splendid carriage at the Ruskin mansion in Denmark Hill and there’s Ruskin’s pompous father (David Suchet, the film being a terrific thesp rally) and controlling mother (Julie Walters, wondrously horrible), who’s been aching to get her hands on her boy again.

After a grim formal dinner, the new couple go to bed (dramatic licence, their wedding night was actually in a hotel in Aberfeldy). Thompson cleverly cuts this key scene short. Effie drops her night dress and evidently stands nude. Ruskin’s face expresses perplexity rather than outright consternation, but in any case he walks off, leaving Effie to sob the night away.

She has no idea what to do but tries hard to be the wife he wants. We see him masturbating in bed, possibly also dramatic licence, while she lies there frustrated. Then her hair starts falling out.

Fortunately she finds a friend, Lady Eastlake, the commanding wife of the President of the Royal Academy (James Fox). She’s Emma Thompson herself, no less, under an imperious coiffure.

From the moment they bond at a stuffy dinner, Lady Eastlake gives Effie solid feminist support. “A ghastly collection of self-congratulatory males, it was a pleasure to hear an intelligent female voice,” she says. Eventually Lady Eastlake discovers the sorry truth about the marriage — “I’ve never heard of such cruelty!” — and starts organising doctors (John Sessions) and lawyers (Derek Jacobi) to free Effie from it.

Effie has a decent prospect on the other side of the annulment too. Although she has rebuffed an Italian trying it on in a gondola, she’s been quite taken by Mr Millais (saucy Tom Sturridge, 28). When she happens upon him skinnydipping in a Scottish loch, her face reveals more sexual curiosity than her husband’s ever does ...

Effie Gray is a companion piece to The Invisible Woman, the film about Dickens’s hidden mistress. Like that film, it’s well scripted, efficiently directed, handsomely dressed and furnished, and vigorously acted. If you like historical drama, it delivers (one of its producers, Donald Rosenfeld, was the president of Merchant-Ivory).

But it is rewriting the past to fit current conceptions, in this case the belief that it is the suppressed woman who matters more than the man, even though the man was the creator and the woman was not. Ruskin, though so strange in his personal life, though he ended in madness, was a man of genius, his influence still vital today. From this film, you would never suspect it.

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