Julia Lambert (Annette Bening) is the most famous actress in 1930s London. She stars in every production put on by her husband/impresario, Michael Gosselyn (Jeremy Irons), and the toast of London comes out to see every performance. She's a vain, snippy bitch, given to smiling to your face and demolishing you with a sneer once you turn your back. She's an Actress, and she can't turn it off. In one of the best performances I can think of about being an actress, Annette Bening shines with a glow that is beyond confidence and beyond beauty. She picks up the sometimes-clunky material and carries it on her shapely shoulders.

In the admittedly featherweight plot, Julia is tired of her current play and wants a break, but Michael doesn't want to stop while the theater is still filling to capacity. Michael introduces her to Tom Fennel (Shaun Evans), a broke American looking for work and in love with Julia's image. He pursues her with an open and frank American-ness, and she's so flattered by his attention that she happily begins an affair with him. They are inseparable, until a party in the country where he takes up with a pretty young actress named Avice (Lucy Punch) and breaks Julia's heart. After retreating to the solitude of the country for a while, Julia decides not to take her humiliation lying down.

Julia gets her revenge. Oh, boy, does she. It reminded me strongly of Michael Caine's breakdown on stage at the end of Little Voice, only the exact opposite. I won't spoil it by detailing the specifics (at least until the next paragraph), but it made me want to applaud. It's a defiant assertion that a forty-something woman is not washed up, not relegated to playing dowdy mothers and aunts. As Bening strides across the stage, cape flapping, she's the most vibrantly beautiful woman in film.

Of course, after the film was done, I realized that Julia's inspired revenge, while a hoot to watch, strikes me as more than a little misguided. She's completely ruined Avice, her rival for Tom's heart. I wouldn't be surprised if Avice decided to leave the theater forever. However, all she's really done to Tom is humiliate Tom's new girlfriend. Tom, whose machinations and lies led to Julia's unhappiness, seems to get off relatively scott-free outside of that. Unless Julia engineer's Tom's dismissal from Michael's employ, I don't see how he will suffer in the long term. Avice, who was the least culpable person in the entire cast, suffers the most.

There are two other, more important, problems with the film. While I love Michael Gambon, I think that trotting him out for Julia's interior monologues was a big mistake. There wasn't a single time that he was onscreen that didn't feel like a lazy screenwriter's effort to avoid forcing Bening to talk to herself. I don't know what would have worked better—that's not my job, unless they want to hire me to write the remake—but I know that this didn't work. The other big problem was Shaun Evans, who played Tom Fennel. Perhaps his open, obvious deceit was supposed to serve a purpose, to show us that an aging actress like Julia would easily fall for the wiles of a younger man. But I didn't buy it. Instead, it seemed that we were supposed to see him as charming and honest, and the later revelation of his serpentine nature was supposed to be shocking. But Evans wasn't good enough to convince me.

Overall, though, this was a highly entertaining film because Bening and Irons make it so. Irons shows that he's not restricted to playing self-destructing balls of nerves or obsessive emotional junkies. In fact, he looks like he's having fun! Mark the calendar. Several other supporting actors—notably, Juliet Stevenson as Julia's long-suffering assistant and Maury Chaykin as the inebriated playwright provide sparkling support. But this is basically Bening's movie, and she makes it work. She certainly deserved her Best Actress nomination, although she won't win because the Oscars devalue comedy (and I admit that I do, too, since I gave my Goatie award to Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake, and I'm not changing my mind).