Effie Gray - Uma Paixão Reprimida

Effie Gray (Dakota Fanning) is the eager teenage bride to prominent art academic John Ruskin (Greg Wise). On the other hand, he is cold to her affections. His unreasonably overprotective mother (Julie Walters) tells her to leave him alone to his work. He champions pre-Raphaelite paintings and John Everett Millais (Tom Sturridge) in particular. Sir Charles Eastlake is the president of the academy and his progressive wife (Emma Thompson) befriends Effie. Effie grows lonely in the stifling home and more attracted to Millais setting off a scandal in Victorian England.

The first half is dull like John Ruskin. There are snippets of goodness from Walters and Thompson. Fanning is captured by the costume drama. Sturridge starts to make himself known at the midpoint. The slow pacing really kills this. Society has imprisoned Effie and the narrative has imprisoned this movie. One way to empower Effie would be to make her more compelling and more capable in the artistic world. Is John Ruskin supposed to be closeted and can they make that part of the story? This movie needs something to energize it and spice it up.

I did like the story.

She was a little girl being courted by an old man who married her once she became of age but would rather pleasure himself than touch his wife who he married for the purpose of cultural stature it seems. She needs a way out which was quite difficult in the Victorian-era of England.

I love movies set in the Victorian age. The costumes the art direction. The set design did stand out in this pic. It reflected how cold and distant the family this little girl married into was.

Also like how it was set up to be very stage like in the movement of certain people in and out of the scene.

Dakota Fanning did a fine job. Give her an A for always choosing challenging roles vs the easy ones girls her age usually take. I don't see this role doing anything for her career but I could be wrong.

Impress that Emma Thompson wrote it.

But overall the movie was too slow and the plot could have been summed up in a smaller amount of time. It seemed that a lot of the movie was to set up the frustration the little girl had with not being able to perform any "wifely" duties and to make her husband and in-laws hated. I found them strange yes, but the film never quite explains the strangeness, which makes it fall short.

It's based on a real story and It's probably better to hear that than to watch the movie. That'll waste less time and get to the point faster.

John Ruskin a famed social thinker, reformer, art critic and painter has his character thrashed in this film. Ruskin when he was 29 years old married Effie Gray (Dakota Fanning) who was 19 years old. Not that great an age difference but clearly Greg Wise as John Ruskin looks too old and sadly too one note, then again his wife Emma Thompson wrote the screenplay and also plays a supporting role as Lady Eastlake.

We are given very little to go on as to why Ruskin would not consummate the marriage, after all Effie is pretty which means either he was turned off by the female body or was homosexual. It probably did not help that Ruskin chose to live with his parents who seemed to have a heavy influence on the adult Ruskin.

Ruskin also encourages his wife to have a developing relationship with his art protégé Everett Millais (Tom Sturridge) even if Millais at one point tells Ruskin how this would look to polite society.

The film does not tell you that after the annulment, Effie married Millais and Ruskin never married again.

This is a handsomely mounted leisurely paced film, there is some location filming in Venice but it is rather dreary, inert and conventional.

Wise and Sturridge are not the strongest actors. Fanning though is rather good, Derek Jacobi and James Fox are rather wasted in their cameos.

I thought it was excellent. Beautifully filmed, great acting and a fascinating story.

Many reviews criticize Dakota's acting but I thought she portrayed the quiet desperation of a woman trapped in a terrible marriage.

Odd to me that every silly comic book based movie gets raves and a truly great movie like this gets panned.

EFFIE GRAY was strangely overlooked by the public despite a sterling cast enacting Emma Thompson's screenplay re-enacting the lives of the Victorians John Ruskin and is failed marriage to Effie Gray and the entry of romance between Effie and the brilliant Pre- Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. Perhaps the primary flaw in this little beautifully photographed period piece is Director Richard Laxton's sluggish pacing of the film – It does drag on forever, unnecessarily. (Laxton's other films include Burton and Taylor, River, and An Englishman in New York.)

The basis of the film is a true Victorian scandal of Effie Gray being the first woman to divorce her husband. In 1848 the 29-year-old art and architecture critic, author and painter John Ruskin (Greg Wise) married Euphemia 'Effie' Gray (Dakota Fanning), the beautiful 19-year-old daughter of family friends. After six increasingly unhappy years, Effie fell in love with her husband's protégé the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais (Tom Sturridge) and set about having the marriage annulled. What reverberated then and now was that the reason given for ending the union was non- consummation. But what really snagged in the public consciousness was Ruskin's explanation of why he didn't fulfill his marital duties (was he gay, simply repulsed by the fact that Effie has pubic hair unlike the classical female figures of art, etc – questions that have not been answered). Effie struggles with John's overbearing parents (Julie Walters and David Suchet), found solace with the prominent Eastlakes (Emma Thompson and James Fox), a doctor (Robbie Coltrane), and one Travers Twist (Derek Jacobi).

The story is interesting, the characterizations excellent, the sets and scenery and costumes brilliant, and for a period piece this film is excellent. Audiences these days are simply more mature than to be 'shielded' form the facts of an unconsummated marriage and more emphasis could have been given to the fact the Effie was an early women's rights activist.