Her performance is understated but always effective, a through line for audiences when things on screen go quiet. As played by Thompson, who has given herself the film’s best lines, Lady Eastlake is the fearless voice of reason this situation clearly needs.įanning, for her part, completely understands her role and its gently feminist context. The only real ray of light in Effie’s life is Lady Eastlake, the wife of Charles Eastlake (Fox), the influential president of the Royal Academy. “Venice was once a virgin,” he tells her pointedly. The couple goes off to Italy, where Ruskin works obsessively on one of his books, “The Stones of Venice,” and she finds herself romantically courted by a handsome Italian (Riccardo Scamarcio), a situation that only makes Ruskin crankier. (Though viewers might reasonably speculate, given that Fanning is 21 and Wise 48, that age difference enters into the couple’s difficulties, this was historically not the case: Effie and Ruskin had only nine years between them.) “What shall we do, what do married people do?” she asks her husband plaintively, and he replies, truthfully but unhelpfully, “I have as little idea as you.” He doesn’t want her around when he writes and thinks, not even to sharpen his pencils, and his officious mother, reminding Effie that “you have married no ordinary man,” tells her to find solace in growing roses and reading the Bible. Starting the very next morning, Effie finds herself a victim of Victorian decorum, someone with no real place in her husband’s life. The reasons for this non-consummation of the marriage have been endlessly speculated upon (the film refrains from expressing an opinion), but it was only the beginning of Effie’s travails. It gets worse when, during a wedding night that has been much commented on from then to now, Effie disrobes in front of her husband, only to have him abruptly get up and leave the bedroom. That’s when the critic’s doting, overpossessive mother lays hands on “my treasure” and announces that she can’t wait to personally give him his bath. The newlyweds are to live with Ruskin’s parents (professionally played by veterans David Suchet and Julie Walters), but things start to go badly from the moment they walk in the door of their new home. In this film, Ruskin (well-played by Greg Wise, Thompson’s husband) looks on Effie as a perfect beauty and considers himself “the luckiest of mortals” when she agrees to marry him, and she feels fortunate as well.
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