Although Julia's retort is the same in the film this scene occurs after she has already met Charles and the attempted insult is made by someone who is not married to him. Charles in the film is not married at all and turns out to be a confirmed bachelor. In novel, Julia has to convince Michael to keep the lackluster Avice Crichton in the play in order to exact her revenge on her. In the adaptation, Michael is having a fling with her. Jimmie Langton also often appears as a figment of Julia's imagination giving advice or reacting to her actions, a device which is not present in the original story. Cast Critical reception Being Julia has received fairly positive reviews, with Bening receiving acclaim for her performance, and an average score of 65/100 at the review aggregator Metacritic, based on 38 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". The film also has an approval rating of 76% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 123 reviews, and an average rating of 6.70/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Annette Bening delivers a captivating performance in Being Julia, a sophisticated comedy that follows a 1930s stage diva who experiences an identity crisis at age 40". In his review in The New York Times, A.O. Scott called the film "a flimsy frame surrounding a brightly colored performance by Annette Bening, whose quick, high-spirited charm is on marvelous display . . . She gives Being Julia a giddy, reckless effervescence that neither Mr. Szabo's stolid direction nor Ronald Harwood's lurching script . . . are quite able to match . . . Ms. Bening walks right up to the edge of melodramatic bathos (the hallmark of the kind of plays in which Julia stars) and then, in a wonderful climactic coup de théâtre, turns it all into farce. Being Julia may not make much psychological or dramatic sense, but Ms. Bening, pretending to be Julia (who is always pretending to be herself), is sensational." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said, "Annette Bening plays Julia in a performance that has great verve and energy, and just as well, because the basic material is wheezy melodrama. All About Eve breathed new life into it all those years ago, but now it's gasping again . . . I liked the movie in its own way, while it was cheerfully chugging along, but the ending let me