Julia is a movie about an
alcoholic (and pretty much everyone around her) making a lot of bad decisions
and then the fallout of those decisions leading to worse consequences. It’s
something like a thriller, because it keeps a high level of tension throughout
the film as it moves into a seedy criminal underworld, but it’s also a drama
about this sad messed-up woman. And yet, in spite of its seriousness and
intensity there are some darkly comic moments, usually delivered because you
can see Julia’s alcoholic brain thinking hard, trying to find the quickest way
out of a situation and usually deciding on a course of action that you already
know is going to solve an immediate problem and yet create another, which of
course she can never see. In Mexico, where about half the film takes place, it
was known as Crimen Repentino, which translates as “Sudden Crime” and
this may very well convey better a sense of what the film’s like, moving
quickly from one bad situation to another, and then when we think there’s a
respite, we’re quickly back in the thick of it based on yet more bad decisions
Julia’s made: the way she flirts almost automatically when she senses it might
give her some advantage, the way she lies compulsively to avoid taking the
blame for any of her actions.
Then again, maybe the English title
conveys the idea of the film best, because it is definitively centered on the
tour de force performance by Tilda Swinton as Julia. She manages to draw you
into Julia’s world, creating a thoroughly unlikable woman who you still manage
to have sympathy for – a tricky act to pull. But that’s probably got something
to do with the kid, too, but more about that in a second. The start of the
chain of events of the film, which I can only tell a little bit of so as not to
give anything key away, is that Julia has lost another job because of her
drinking. Her friend, trying to help her get her life together, tells her that
the only way she’ll get continued help from him is to attend AA meetings which
she’s got no patience for. But knowing a good thing when she sees it and not
wanting to cut off his support, she goes. There she meets a woman who we
immediately sense is a little odd – and so does Julia – who asks Julia for
help. You see, she’s Julia’s neighbor and has seen her before. She’s got a son
named Tom whose evil grandfather, she explains, won’t let her see him. It would
be simple, she explains to an eye-rolling, agitated and bored Julia, to simply
kidnap Tom when he’s out on a picnic and zip off to her family home in Mexico
where there’s tons of money and a perfect life just waiting for her – and for
Julia too if she’s willing to help out. At first Julia says the same thing we
do – “Are you nuts?” – but then she starts to see that maybe it could work, she
could help out for a little bit and get a huge payoff for merely driving a car.
And that’s as much as you can know before watching it because part of the major
interest of the film is watching how Julia’s terrible judgment – but also her
quick-witted thinking – keeps things moving.
And once things start to roll,
there’s no stopping it. Julia moves from one situation to the next, behaving
badly and foolishly in a way that’s sometimes uncomfortable to watch, sometimes
perversely funny as when she slurs to the kid she’s trying to kidnap “I can see
you’re mad at me.” The movie could easily have been a generic road-movie comedy
with an edge – there are a lot of films with a grouchy adult paired with an
annoying kid where we come to like both of them by the end – but this is not
that movie. It pulls inspiration from John Cassavetes’ 1980 film Gloria,
where Gena Rowlands is a gangster’s former flame who ends up protecting a kid
when the mob wipes out his family but misses him. For me, this film is even better
than its inspiration, and that’s largely due to Swinton’s amazing performance
which, again, puts you in a position of sympathy with a woman you probably
shouldn’t be sympathizing with. She simply nails the mind and mannerisms of an
alcoholic, constantly assessing the way to use her assets to turn any situation
to her best immediate advantage, which proves to be what keeps her alive and
moving in the film as things go from bad to worse.
- Patrick Brown
- Patrick Brown
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