Julia

As the hard-drinking, hard-luck, and just plain hard Julia, Tilda Swinton is a frantic force of nature and a garishly glorious mess. Swinton doesn't just chew the scenery in this down-and-dirty kidnapping-gone-wrong saga, she devours it. There probably won't be a more attention demanding, shamelessly uninhibited, totally WATCH ME ACT performance onscreen this year.

French director/writer Erick Zonca first shows Julia as a loud party girl having a little too good a time at a bar with fellow office workers. When she wakes up disoriented and disheveled in a car with a passed-out companion the next morning, it's obvious she is not quite the urbane sophisticate we may have imagined. As her brutally honest friend Mitch (Saul Rubinek) puts it, "What you are is an out of control, suicidal, blind alcoholic." She's also belligerent, deceitful, and not very smart.

Around the time Julia gets fired from her job, she receives a logistically dubious but financially irresistible proposition from a fellow AA member (Kate del Castillo). For helping the woman kidnap her son from the boy's wealthy father and spirit him from California to Mexico, she will give Julia $50,000. Julia's attempt to put her own double-crossing spin on that already shaky plan starts out badly and gets progressively worse. Paranoid, frequently furious, and with a bottle always close at hand, she screws up nearly all of her desperate attempts at improvisation. Also, her nine-year-old victim (Aidan Gould) turns out to be more on the ball than Julia expected, which causes additional problems.

The most impressive thing about the movie is the way it makes a thoroughly detestable title character crazily compelling to watch. Julia is a liar, a thief, and a self-centered shrew, the kind of woman who drugs a child, hogties him and hides him behind a motel sofa. Wild-eyed and sweaty, she's a sloppy tramp who wakes up more than once with a breast hanging out and just doesn't give a damn. Swinton plays the unrestrained role without a hint of vanity, wallowing in egoless excess.

Although the plot mostly stays noirishly gritty without becoming black-humorously ironic, Julia's exasperated histrionics are entertainingly over-the-top—such as when she thinks she has lost the kidnapped kid in the desert. Swinton is in nearly every scene of the 138-minute film, which goes from strange to stranger after the action shifts to Tijuana. That's where things manage to get even more outrageously plot-twisty and shockingly violent.

A couple of unlikely plot points near the end, in which Julia does something incredibly stupid and then something incredibly skillful, don't sink the screenplay. By then, we're in deep enough to believe that this wild and crazy broad is capable of absolutely anything.

—James Dawson
05.06.09

Tilda Swinton stars in director Erick Zonca's drama about a 40-year-old alcoholic who, in a rare moment of sobriety, sees where her life is headed and makes one last-ditch attempt to steer herself away from the disastrous path that she has been locked on for as far back as she can remember. Julia may be manipulative, notoriously untrustworthy, and completely incapable of uttering any word that isn't an outright lie, but somehow -- perhaps due to sheer charisma -- this statuesque deceiver has always managed to get by. But Julia has been hardened by too many vodkas and too many one-night stands, and lately the lonely life of drifting from job to job in her 1979 Chrysler New Yorker has left her wanting something more. While her old boyfriend Mitch occasionally tries to break through Julia's haze, lately she has surrendered herself to the fact that she is simply one of life's losers. As her finances begin to run short and panic begins to set in, a desperate Julia turns to crime but is forced to go on the run with a young boy named Tom after her plan falls hopelessly apart. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi