BEFORE: Sticking with plays and playwrights, and the time period of the 1930's/1940's. Now I wish I had flopped the two films about Orson Welles, because it might have made linking easier on this end. (But then again, it might have made linking harder on the other end...). Well, either way, Claire Danes from "Me and Orson Welles" was also in a film called "Evening" with Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "Cradle Will Rock"), so it all worked out.
THE PLOT: At the behest of an old and dear friend, playwright Lillian Hellman undertakes a dangerous mission to smuggle funds into Nazi Germany
AFTER: This one's a little confounding, because I don't really know what to do with it. The film shies away from anything close to a resolution, at every possible chance. For all I know, the character of Julia never even existed, except in Lillian Hellman's mind, in a very Tyler Durden sort of way.
We see Hellman struggling to write her play (maybe she should have ditched the frustrating typewriter and just wrote the thing out longhand...), and while blocked she decides to take a trip to Paris to visit her childhood friend, Julia. The two girls are seen in flashbacks as kids, but of course memories are notoriously unreliable, especially in films. Lillian is in an on-again, off-again relationship with writer Dashiell Hammett, who encourages her to go to Europe and track Julia down. Whether this is done as a real quest, a vision quest, or some kind of lesbian wish-fulfillment fantasy is left undetermined.
She locates Julia in a hospital in Vienna (after apparently being injured in Nazi riots), but Julia is mostly covered in bandages, and can't speak. Is that even her? Later, the hospital denies having any record of a patient by that name, so the mystery deepens. After years of writing back and forth, and a host of unsuccessful phone conversations, Lillian finally contacts Julia through some intermediaries, and tasks her with visiting Moscow by way of Berlin, and dropping off a number of packages along the way. Most likely this was money to help fund the fight against fascism, but it would only be dangerous if Hellman happened to be Jewish. Oh, wait, she was.
Much is then made about the logistics of evading Nazi customs officers - when to wear her hat, when to leave the hatbox behind, who to give the box of candy to. I've never seen any film get so caught up in the logistics of luggage.
Finally Lillian meets Julia in a Berlin cafe, where once again hats are worn, hats are removed, coats are put on top of hats, and that's all important somehow. Julia reveals a number of things, including an upcoming trip to New York and the fact that she wants Lillian to raise her infant child. But she neglects to hammer out the details of this back-alley adoption, so Lillian is forced to visit every bakery in Alsace, looking for the family holding the baby, and is never able to track her down. Which is another suggestion that maybe the whole thing was a fiction or part of Hellman's imagination - because usually when people have concrete plans or tasks for you they give you solid details like addresses and things.
NITPICK POINT: I realize that many Americans are arrogant about language, and we tend to travel around the world thinking that English should be spoken everywhere. Still, you would think that after the twentieth frustrating overseas phone call, or the third unsuccessful trip to Europe, that even a stuck-up playwright would either take the time to learn a few words of German, or bring along a translator of some kind.
Also starring Jane Fonda (last seen in "Cat Ballou"), Jason Robards (last seen in "Quick Change"), Maximilian Schell, Hal Holbrook (last seen in "Lincoln"), Meryl Streep (last seen in "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events"), John Glover (last seen in "Payback").
RATING: 3 out of 10 checkpoints
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