Blustery Bening offers little in ‘Being Julia’

Being Annette Bening must be nice. While most of her contemporaries are lucky to land bit parts as eccentric spinsters and domestic martyrs, she gets the gift of a leading role, sprigged with prestige and conceived as a path to the Oscar podium.

The actress plays the main character in “Being Julia,” an adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham novel about a West End grand dame who has a fling with a fan half her age. It’s a showy part, to put it mildly, with grand gestures, big emotions and eye-catching costumes.

Yet the end result is so lackluster and pedestrian, a more fitting title is “Being and Nothingness.”

The twice-Oscar-nominated Bening caterwauls her way through the story, all noise, no depth. She is a much less convincing Brit than Renée Zellweger, sounding more Stamford than Stratford. Also, Julia is supposed to be droll and saucy, but most of the time, Bening seems stiff and joyless.

Director Istvan Szabo (“Mephisto”) and screenwriter Ronald Harwood (“The Pianist”) have constructed a creaky vehicle, saddling Bening with an hour of go-nowhere emoting before the film finally gets some juice in its final act.

Julia reigns over the theater scene in pre-World War II London, refusing to age out of ingenue roles even though she’s 45 and exhausted by the grind of eight shows a week. “I’m tie-yudddd,” she blusters to her producer-husband, Michael (Jeremy Irons), after chomping the scenery in a comically maudlin show, “Farewell My Love.”

She sparks to life, however, when a handsome American fan-boy, Tom (Shaun Evans), makes romantic advances. As savvy as she is in her professional life, she’s rather dim when it comes to personal matters, too busy gazing at her own wizened reflection to recognize Tom’s questionable intentions and her husband’s, er, side projects.

Things start to get interesting when a pretty blond newcomer named Avice (British comedian Lucy Punch) enters the picture. As Avice and Julia prepare to co-star in a new show, the older actress plots payback.

“Being Julia” does have hit potential with its target market: mid-life women. Though the heroine suffers one humiliation after another, she ultimately emerges triumphant. Like last year’s “Calendar Girls,” the movie is burnished with a sense of menopausal empowerment.