Effie Gray movie review & film summary (2015)
Gray herself wrote, “He alleged various reasons, hatred of children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason…that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April [1848].” Ruskin later wrote, “It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But 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.”
Instead of exploring this as openly as possible and taking some chances, Thompson and director Richard Laxton only hint at what’s wrong between them, and so Wise is forced to be ever more opaque while Fanning is presented as a Sleeping Beauty only. There are colorful detours here, like a trip to Venice that is presided over by the always-welcome Claudia Cardinale, but such excursions only serve to blur an already blurry situation. To put it in crude terms, “Effie Gray” is a film about a young woman who very righteously wants to get laid who finds that her only out after a long ordeal is the fact that her husband has not taken her virginity, and there is definitely an irony in that. If Ruskin had tried a bit sexually with her and failed, she might have been stuck with him for life. It was only the fact that he was such a screwed-up prude that finally offered her a possible escape hatch.
This might qualify as a spoiler if you aren’t familiar with the case, so tread softly here. “Effie Gray” runs 108 minutes, yet it feels like it ends right before the real drama is about to begin. Why on earth have Thompson and Laxton chosen to show us the very long and drawn-out unhappiness of the Ruskin-Gray marriage and his un-giving cruelty toward her if we don’t get to see his comeuppance and public humiliation after she charges him with impotence to win her divorce? Surely we have earned a few scenes of his reaction to this scandal in social situations, and surely it would be good to know just what happens to Effie (she married Millais and bore him eight children). Whatever his personal drawbacks, and they seem to have been very extensive, Ruskin was an incisive art critic and he is still very much worth reading. If the lambasting he gets in “Mr. Turner” and in “Effie Gray” leads a few people to read his work then that might be the keenest irony of all in this odd open season of Ruskin-bashing.
