Why Ruskin never engaged in sexual congress with his wife is a question that has plagued historians and art aficionados for years.
#Effie grey movie
There’s no truly delicate way to put this, so here it is: Effie Gray is a movie about a man who refuses to have sex with his wife. Ruskin and Gray’s relationship, although apparently one initially built on affection – young Effie tells her worried sister that she should be pleased she’s marrying Ruskin, because she loves him so much – wasn’t a good one. Without knowing any of the film’s backstory, without realizing this is rooted in truth, the film takes on a decidedly different cast. Fanning is twenty-one, Wise is forty-eight, a difference that makes the early meeting of Effie and Ruskin feel very, very unusual in nature (and we’ll get to that later). Yet, in the film, the gap is sizable and jarring. That age gap in itself is not particularly compelling, and it’s one that speaks to Ruskin’s desire to establish his career before getting married (get your affairs in order, then get a wife). It’s worth noting that Effie was nineteen (very nearly twenty) at the time, while Ruskin was just a decade older than her. Ruskin took an interest in Effie long before she was of marrying age, and the film opens with the pair finally making their – apparently, endorsed by both the Ruskins and the Grays – union official. The fairy tale that kicks off the film nods to that, as the Gray family home was the site of Ruskin’s grandfather’s suicide (romantic, right?), an event that weirdly bonded the Ruskins and the Grays forever. Effie was just a kid when she first met Ruskin – the leading art critic of their time, and one whose contributions to the art of criticism are still felt today – when he visited her family in Scotland.
It’s also a period-set tale that speaks to Victorian era sensibilities about marriage, sexuality, and divorce. The story of Effie Gray is a fascinating one, filled with mystery and intrigue and plenty of unanswered questions.
It certainly doesn’t help the film’s muddled timeline, nor its muffled take on a genuinely compelling slice of history. In a world where one-off horror films giddily toss up on-screen notes that the material is “based on a true story,” it’s bizarre that Laxton’s film refuses to make its source material – life – clear to its viewers, even by way of something as reasonable and expected as its own “based on a true story” note. That slim prologue is an odd entry point for the film, one that hints at the picture’s real roots while also avoiding making it plain that Effie Gray is based on a true story. Effie Gray opens with the telling of a fairy tale – not a particularly happy one, as it’s rooted in death, but still a fairy tale – that sets the stage for Richard Laxton’s laconic, lush, somewhat misguided, and occasionally boring look inside the bizarre and twisted marriage of Gray ( Dakota Fanning) and John Ruskin ( Greg Wise).
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