A perfectly adequate movie which demystifies a Victorian scandal, where the plot drives towards its inevitable conclusion, showing how the mores of upper-class stiff Victorianism are ultimately as culpable in John Ruskin's frigidity towards his young wife. Ruskin is a nuanced and conflicted character: both pitiable but also possessing a cruel streak.

期待這部電影的原因有兩個(gè)，一是因?yàn)镋mma Thompson再次擔(dān)當(dāng)編劇，二是因?yàn)閷?duì)John Ruskin, Effie Gray, John Everett Millais這三個(gè)人的關(guān)系比較感興趣。

18歲的蘇格蘭少女Effie Gray與家族舊識(shí)，事業(yè)正如日中天的藝術(shù)評(píng)論家John Ruskin結(jié)為夫妻。離開父母的溫暖羽翼，蘇格蘭坦蕩開闊的山川高地，Effie跟隨夫君來到車水馬龍的倫敦。哪想新婚燕爾，丈夫卻因厭惡年輕妻子的裸體而摔門逃走。自此之后，她再?zèng)]有得到一絲夫妻間應(yīng)有的親昵與溫柔。John Ruskin, 在外界眼里是令人尊敬崇拜的學(xué)者，而關(guān)起門來卻是冷漠，偏執(zhí)，只懂得埋頭工作，對(duì)父母惟命是從的“情感缺陷患者”。對(duì)愛情心灰意冷，絕望至極的Effie遇到了貴人Lady Eastlake和當(dāng)時(shí)還貧困潦倒，將Ruskin視為伯樂的Millais. 在前者的幫助下，Effie以“未行夫妻之實(shí)”為名起訴離婚，并最終成為了Millais的妻子，為其養(yǎng)育了八個(gè)孩子。

挑選這樣的題材來做電影改編，Emma Thompson 著實(shí)很大膽。雖然一直有人提倡將藝術(shù)家和其人格分開來對(duì)待，但在感情層面上這幾乎是不可能的。估計(jì)John Ruskin的忠實(shí)擁躉在看過這部電影之后心中偶像的形象多少會(huì)打些折扣，甚至還會(huì)有人出頭為其抱不平吧。在沒看這部電影之前，聽過“Ruskin 的老婆后來跟Millais跑了”的傳說，當(dāng)時(shí)的想法是，貴圈太亂，暫不做評(píng)論?？墒强催^Emma Thompson的改編，對(duì)Effie滋生深深同情，對(duì)Millais這位相貌出眾，對(duì)待女性溫和體貼的有志青年，更是青睞有加。

先來說Effie的悲劇。她唯一的錯(cuò)就是嫁給了一個(gè)天才。天才的愛情總是很自我，像梵高，畢加索。Ruskin也一樣，他愛上的是含苞待放的少女Effie，他把她女神化了，一旦這個(gè)女神有凡人的任何欲望，他都像夢(mèng)想破滅般無法接受。而Effie卻是一個(gè)腳踏實(shí)地的女子，她想要過人間煙火的生活，經(jīng)營兩個(gè)人的家，生兒育女，洗洗涮涮，縫縫補(bǔ)補(bǔ)。夫妻二人，生活在不同的世界。就像Ruskin那位保護(hù)欲過剩的母親所說：You married no ordinary man, the best you can help, is to leave him alone. 嫁給一個(gè)才情過高的人，注定要以孤獨(dú)為代價(jià)。然而，還有更糟的，Effie遇到了現(xiàn)代劇中標(biāo)準(zhǔn)的刁蠻婆婆。從第一次進(jìn)Ruskin家的大門，她應(yīng)該就有預(yù)感，自己不屬于這兒，或者說，并不受歡迎。在這里必須為Julie Waters的演技點(diǎn)個(gè)贊。簡單兩個(gè)小細(xì)節(jié)，就把Mrs Ruskin的性格展露無遺。比如John Ruskin帶著新媳婦剛進(jìn)家門，她馬上抱著兒子噓寒問暖，根本都沒正眼瞧兒媳婦。再比如吃晚飯的時(shí)候，一臉不情愿的把禮物送給兒媳，到老還不忘添一句“反正我死后他們也會(huì)把這東西給你的?！庇龅竭@樣control freak的婆婆，稚嫩的Effie當(dāng)然無法招架，唯有更加消沉抑郁。

所幸，她的救星及時(shí)出現(xiàn)了。Emma Thompson給自己挑了個(gè)討巧的角色。這位Lady Eastlake放到近代絕對(duì)是女權(quán)主義者。對(duì)于Effie的尷尬處境，她在吃驚的同時(shí)，更感詫異。無論對(duì)方是如何名望鼎盛的藝術(shù)權(quán)威，虐待妻子，就無法容忍。在她的勸導(dǎo)和疏通之下，Effie 通過律師最終解決了離婚問題。這位Lady Eastlake就像Emma Thompson之前飾演的神奇保姆McPhee，權(quán)杖一揮，便為Effie掃清了障礙，重獲自由之身。只不過，看著Emma額頭和臉上的皺紋，讓人無限懷念起《理智與情感》中她與休 格蘭特眼波傳情的青蔥歲月。

再來說三角關(guān)系中，另外關(guān)鍵的一環(huán)：Millais米萊。不得不承認(rèn)，濃眉長睫粉唇的Tom Sturridge為“第三者”米萊加了不少分。不過，暫且撇下顏值不談，有哪一個(gè)女子不希望嫁給一個(gè)體貼的人呢？從道德上來講，Ruskin是自己的資助者，是必須要尊敬的長輩。但從感情上來說，Millais無法強(qiáng)迫自己為一個(gè)冷漠自私的人工作，更無法眼看著一個(gè)好端端的女子硬被折磨得心灰意冷，麻木不仁。在陪同Ruskin夫婦回蘇格蘭高地度假期間，Millais每天與Effie相對(duì)，他看到了她深藏在心底的開朗，她的善良，她的才華，也看到了她的苦難。但迫于倫常，兩人相愛，卻無法相守。影片中幾次穿插Millais的畫，其中那副溺水的Ophelia 奧菲利亞意在映射心如死灰的Effie。一次采風(fēng)途中跌倒，鼻子撞破流血之后的Millais對(duì)Effie說過，我的鼻子不能破，找人當(dāng)模特太貴了，我總是拿自己當(dāng)模特，鼻子破了就麻煩了。與Effie在一起之后，Millais以妻子當(dāng)模特畫了無數(shù)副畫。而Effie也圓了自己的愿望，為Millais生了八個(gè)孩子。而為了供養(yǎng)妻兒，Millais后來也不得不瘋狂作畫賺錢，以至于有人說他的畫尺寸越來越小，質(zhì)量也越來越差。但是，對(duì)比一下，不惜為五斗米折腰也要享受夫妻天倫之樂的Millais和寧肯禁欲也要維護(hù)純潔幻想的Ruskin，哪個(gè)更幸福呢？怕是如人飲水，冷暖自知吧。

P.S.這個(gè)月末關(guān)于英國另外一個(gè)泰斗級(jí)畫家William Turner特納的電影也即將上映?？磥斫衲晔钱嫾覀饔涬娪按竽陗

John Ruskin: Mike Leigh and Emma Thompson have got him all wrong

He was a critic who could out-paint most painters, a great educator who reinvented how we see art. Why has John Ruskin been reduced to a prude and a fop in two new films?

Philip Hoare
Tuesday 7 October 2014 21.00 AEST

On behalf of John Ruskin, I would like to sue Mike Leigh for defamation of character. In Mr Turner, Leigh’s astonishing and sweepingly beautiful new film, the painter’s greatest champion has been traduced. Ruskin, played by Joshua McGuire, is a simpering Blackadderish caricature of an art intellectual: a lisping, red-headed, salon fop.

I almost felt physically sick when I saw him onscreen. Not just because of the extraordinary disconnect between Leigh and Timothy Spall’s brilliant realisation of Turner and the complete misrepresentation of Ruskin, but because this injustice is one that has been going on for more than a century. For Ruskin celebrated Turner above all other artists. While others decried his work, he wrote that his paintings “move and mingle among the pale stars, and rise up into the brightness of the illimitable heaven, whose soft, and blue eye gazes down into the deep waters of the sea for ever”. This posthumous portrait is unconscionable.

I’d barely recovered from the shock when along comes Emma Thompson’s equally wonderful but equally misleading Effie Gray. Two Ruskins in one season? Neither comes near to the truth. In Thompson’s film, the critic is centre-stage. His portrayal, by Greg Wise, is nearer the mark, at least visually. But Wise plays Ruskin as an austere ascetic, whose passions are reserved for the stones of Venice and the paint of the pre-Raphaelites. He cannot countenance the physicality of his young bride Euphemia Gray, as she confronts him on their wedding night with her post-pubescent body. The film tacitly endorses the notion that Ruskin was rendered impotent by the sight of female pubic hair, being accustomed only to the frozen marble bodies of classical sculpture.

I don’t believe that for a second. In his recent book, Marriage of Inconvenience, Robert Brownell claims that Effie was something of an adventurer, encouraged by her importunate family to marry Ruskin to forestall her father’s bankruptcy. Far from being disgusted with her physicality, Ruskin – a rigorous Christian and idealist – felt anxious and subconsciously betrayed by the realisation that his love for Effie was a one-sided affair. For him, there simply could be no sexual consummation without the moral exchange of love. Anything else would have been dishonest. And when Effie sued for annulment on grounds of his impotency, Ruskin was too gentlemanly to argue.

Nor is this the only calumny Ruskin has suffered. Despite having been the prophet of his age, the best art critic this country has ever produced, the patron of the pre-Raphaelites and of Turner, his legacy has been reduced to one of a bearded reactionary who, in 1878, accused James Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” when confronted with the American painter’s avant-garde nocturnes.

But turn that quote around for a minute. Wasn’t it an accurate, kinetic description of an action painting before its time? When the attention-seeking Whistler sued for libel, the action landed Ruskin back in court. Whistler won, but was awarded risible damages of one farthing. He went on to accrue yet more fame on the back of the publicity. Ruskin suffered one of the nervous breakdowns that would contribute to his eventual insanity.

Why can’t we cope with Ruskin’s genius? He was an astonishing figure, as Tim Hilton’s magisterial 2002 biography of him proves. He was a great artist in his own right: his watercolours of Swiss mountains and nature studies speak of an extraordinary brilliance, made more passionate by their creator’s intent. Ruskin put art into practice. He was a utopian who devised the Guild of St George, a celebration of workmanship that underpinned the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris. He was, above all, a great educator. In his bravura lectures in Oxford, he used giant blown-up watercolours of nature studies thrown on to screens by limelight, more akin to Andy Warhol’s Flowers. These events became performances in the same way that Joseph Beuys’ blackboard lectures would a century later.

The Stones of Venice, Ruskin’s bestselling book, styled an entire century. Indeed, he blamed himself for the endless gothic terraces that coursed through Victorian suburbs. Modern Painters, his volumes of criticism, reinvented the way we saw art. Their rebooting of critical theory is still cited by such discerning critics as Michael Bracewell, acclaimed author of The Space Between: Selected Writings on Art. “Ruskin’s passionate championing of particular artists paved the way for such great later critics as David Sylvester and Robert Hughes,” Bracewell says. “Such erudition, clarity and richly opinionated rigour is sorely missed in contemporary art criticism.”

Ruskin was a visionary, more the progeny of William Blake than a member of the Victorian establishment. He foresaw climate change in The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century – both as a physical threat, in industrial pollution, and a metaphysical one, as a “plague cloud made of dead men’s’ souls”. He despised capitalism and influenced the early Labour party more than Marx, a legacy embodied in the Oxford college founded in his name. His work inspired a new generation in the 20th century: ordinary people of my father’s generation, men such as Philip Ashurst, a Coram hospital foundling and later shop steward, who was introduced to radicalism by Ruskin’s writings.

Although he disdained new technologies such as the train, Ruskin did not reject other advances. He advocated the new medium of photography, and in his monthly newsletter to the working man, Fors Clavigera (Fate’s Hammer), he created what was in effect a 19th-century blog. Sitting at his desk with a pile of newspaper cuttings by his side, he worked through the day’s stories to surreal effect, creating new juxtapositions of imagery that augur the work of the modernists and even, perhaps, William Burroughs’ cut-ups. Even now, this writing seems bizarre and shocking. Debating the nature of the soul, he mused: “I don’t believe any of you would like to live in a room with a murdered man in the cupboard, however well-preserved chemically; even with a sunflower growing out at the top of a head.”

This was a man who defied the expectations of his age. Like his pupil Oscar Wilde – who willingly dirtied his pale hands in Ruskin’s campaign to mend roads in Oxford as a demonstration of the dignity of labour – he was his own invention. One key detail that both Leigh and Thompson get right is the ever-present cornflower blue necktie Ruskin wore, knowing that it highlighted his blue eyes, along with a brown-velvet-collared greatcoat. They were as much his trademarks as Warhol’s wig, or Beuys’s homburg hat.

Indeed, he continues to inspire more thoughtful contemporary artists, such as Tania Kovats, Jeremy Millar and John Kippin, while the Ruskin School of Art has recently recreated his Elements of Drawing as a digital resource. Paul Bonaventura, curator at the school, acknowledges that to some Ruskin’s writing seems “illogical, self-contradictory and just plain silly”. But, says Bonaventura, that’s missing the point: “One goes to Ruskin for the power of seeing. The sustained, inquiring scrutiny of visual experience, the incisive glance and vivid insight; these are the things for which he is rightly celebrated.”

Some might regard this as rearguard action in the face of conceptual art. But Turner prize-listed artist George Shaw – whose intensely painted scenes of inner-city decay might be the product of a modern-day Ruskin, although not his shaven head and Ben Sherman shirts – is not taking this lying down. “Ruskin-bashing has become something of a bloodsport for the nobs and yobs of the contemporary culture machine,” he says. “It’s because he’s fucked up and commentators are obsessed with frailty – it’s their version of the Jeremy Kyle show and it allows them to put the boot in.”

Shaw has been a fan of Ruskin since childhood. “I admired his seriousness and saw him as something out of the Old Testament, forging ahead and pointing the way madly into the new world. He was fur coat and knickers because he could draw better than the artists he championed. I’d like to see today’s blabbermouths try that. Isn’t he a Victorian Warhol, on the edge and in the centre at all times? And like Warhol, he saw his own philosophy and his belief not within himself but in the world around him.” Barely drawing breath, Shaw cites a painful image of Ruskin “as a wounded animal searching for cover in a re-created world”.

On the shores of Coniston Water, perched like a Wagnerian fantasy over the gun-metal Cumbrian lake, stands the physical embodiment of Ruskin’s outsiderdom: Brantwood House. Its Ludwig-like atmosphere is enhanced by the gilded steam barge by which one sails across to Ruskin’s retreat, ascending the banks to the manse. Once inside, the full force of Ruskin’s personality hits you. Everything in its interior – from the cabinets of shells and minerals to the paintings on the walls and the tapestries embroidered with his motto: “There is no wealth but life” – is an expression of this ultimate collector, a man who sought to catalogue our experience of the world and the way art attempts to portray it. Wonderingly, you wander upstairs and into the sanctum of his bedchamber. The room is lit by an oriel window, forcing the lake light into the room, as if it might conjure up a hologram of its tenant.

If it did, it would be a disturbing sight, since this is where Ruskin went mad. It happened one night, as devils danced on his bedpost: he looked out to the lake and finally lost contact with the real world. This last crisis came at the end of another traumatic love affair. He had fallen in love with Rose La Touche when she was barely 10 years old, and he in his 40s. He had pursued her, as she turned of age, to her parents’ horror. Barred from her company, he would chase her carriage through London, at one point confronting her in the Royal Academy and handing her a forbidden love letter. Just as the affair with Effie Gray had begun in hope and ended in disaster, this last relationship concluded even more finally. Rose, psychiatrically disturbed and suffering from anaemia, died at the age of 24. A grieving Ruskin sought the services of mediums to conjure up her spirit; as he began to lose his senses, he believed they had been married, with Joan of Arc as their bridesmaid.

Art could not retrieve Ruskin’s sanity, but it remained his consolation. Under Coniston’s Turnerian skies, he would lie in the bottom of his boat and watch the clouds. He was a burnt-out wreck, a shuffling figure with an ever wilder beard, his pale blue eyes fading – a great evangelist struck dumb. Yet he remained the greatest cultural commentator of his age, because he stood apart from it, and saw it with clarity. A man of such ferocious spirit should not be remembered as a reactionary prude. Far from caricature, Ruskin demands, now more than ever, our absolute praise.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/07/john-ruskin-emma-thompson-mike-leigh-film-art