Tilda Swinton in Julia (2008)
On the Edge
Tilda Swinton has been viewed as a goddess of independent cinema and otherwise for quite some time, at least since her days with Derek Jarman’s troupe in the 1980s and her appearance in Orlando (1992). Tall, pale, commanding, she comes from an aristocratic background but can be convincing as just about anyone. If an experimental movie needs her to appear and simply exist within its frames, Swinton can do that. If it is kitchen sink naturalism that is needed, as in The War Zone (1999), she can make herself ground down and living day to day, and if that includes a thick slice of sexual exploration, as in Young Adam (2003), where she vigorously grapples with Ewan McGregor, she’s all in.
Yet Swinton is generally at her best when she can go big, and she seems particularly invigorated by the chance to play types that can expand from a caricature base into something more archetypal. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her outrageously large, intimidating performance in Julia (2008), a very risky 144-minute film co-written and directed by French director Erick Zonca in which Swinton’s Julia Harris is a dangerous party girl past her prime who is first seen in a barroom armored with glittering eyelashes and dangling earrings; she eventually makes an animal-like sort of howl that is more touched with pain and desperation than any surviving need for pleasure.
Right before the title card comes on, Swinton’s drunken Julia stops for a moment to take in the keyboard riff in the Eurythmics’s “Sweet Dreams” as if to say, “Fuck it!” but the effect is forlorn. Julia omits almost all back story for its main character, and this is refreshing in a time when we are drowning in lazy TV writer back stories, but close viewing makes Julia Harris seem like an orphan; nowhere in any of her behavior does it suggest she once had parents or supervision of any kind. She is a free agent who knows deep down that the party is over for her, and she keeps returning verbally to the idea of her “luck” being bad, as if luck were all life were about.
Swinton’s Julia sizes up people with predatory eyes to see how much of a sucker they are and what they might do for her, and she has an AA sponsor named Mitch (Saul Rubinek) who might be a little in love with her, a possibility that Julia exploits to the full. Likely Julia has led many lives before we meet her, and she was probably lots of fun to be around if you were a certain type of man and probably far less so if you were a woman, but she has deep-seated contempt for everyone and is somewhat disconnected from reality, and this leads her into areas of real-life action that couldn’t be less sympathetic.
Yet we can see that Julia’s time is up, and the desperation that could arise from that; behavior that might seem attractive in your twenties is not the same when you have reached your forties. One of her male friends tells her, “You don’t know how to end things…go look in the mirror.” We see the grey roots at the front of her bright red hair when she isn’t made up for battle, and though Julia can pass for ten or so years younger in this mode in a dark bar, she looks her age and more in the hungover morning aftermath, in unforgiving light.
Julia is caught in a lifelong rut where her only value is seen as sexual, and now that youth is going or has gone, so has any power she had. And Julia likes power. She would enjoy lording it over people if only her “luck” would change for the better. Swinton uses an American accent as a weapon in Julia, much as Judy Davis has done in her best work. (Cate Blanchett often tries this, too, but her American accents sometimes sound robotic or non-human.) Both Swinton and Davis can get a lot out of the perceived hollowness of the American sound to their ears, and Swinton is so specific in her speech patterns and extravagant domineering physical behavior in Julia that she seems to be working from a real-life model or models for this characterization.
The mentally unstable Elena (Kate del Castillo) speaks about kidnapping her young son to Julia at AA, and she mentions the sum of $50,000 to do so, and though Julia sounds wised-up and disbelieving as a formality, there is something about this idea that awakens the gambler in her, with deadly results. She convinces herself of the righteousness of Elena’s story over a drink, muttering about it at a dark bar, which is a sign that Julia does have a version of morality buried somewhere deep inside her.
When she visits an important old boyfriend named Nick (Jude Ciccolella) and tries to interest him in what she terms “the double cross of a lifetime” where she would kidnap Elena’s child and get more money for herself, Julia is despicable, and yet. She tells Nick that she’s getting old, but he cries, “You’re just as beautiful and crazy as ever!” He tries to dissuade her kidnapping scheme, to no avail.
Julia makes a crucial mistake when she gets in for $3000 for a gun from a lower depths acquaintance, which means there is no turning back from her criminal plan. When she is psyching herself up to kidnap the boy and suddenly the boy’s handler asks for help with his car, Julia panics and backs up and runs him over before abducting the 8-year-old Tom (Aidan Gould), who is only wearing a small swimsuit; we later learn that she put this handler in a coma. She terrorizes Tom, who is a very particular type of well-mannered good boy and keeps calling her “ma’am” as she ties him to a radiator and drugs him with pills.
The majority of Julia follows the relationship between Julia and Tom, which never remotely approaches the cliched “bonding” we might expect. Finally fed up, Tom cries, “Kiss my butt, you idiot!” at Julia, and he is a smart little boy who is always able to poke logical holes in her lies, for Julia feels the need to con him, too, because conning people is her only mode of communication. These two eventually end up in Mexico, and there is a disturbing little scene where Julia wakes up in the morning after one of her drunken hook-ups and Tom looks very skeptical as she embraces him and then tickles him; he stares at her bare breast in a way that signals scientific interest only. These two people could not be more different. Little Tom is establishment already, while Julia is a born loser going down the drain snarling all the way.
Julia makes another key mistake when the ransom money is set to be delivered by Mitch (a cool two million) and her party girl side kicks in and she decides to take Tom out to celebrate. Her abductee winds up being kidnapped again by Tijuana criminals who want a $50,000 ransom, the original number she thought she was getting from Elena, and this last stretch of the film is where Swinton’s Julia really proves her limitless nerve, the type of nerve that is exhibited by Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’s Gloria (1980), a clear jumping off point for Julia. (Those who have not seen Julia and want to should skip the next two paragraphs.)
There comes a key moment when the kidnappers have taken Tom off again and the look on Julia’s face is stricken; is this the first time in her life she has cared about anyone else but herself? Most likely. When the time comes for her to choose between Tom’s life and the money on a busy nighttime highway, Julia shields the boy with her body and lets the cash go to a young Mexican criminal she has traded very barbed insults with. “I knew you were the mother!” he cries as he makes off with her loot, and Swinton finally lets her accent slip on the last line, “OK, I’m taking you to your mother,” like an artist signing a huge Abstract-Expressionist canvas.
This last line makes no sense even in context. Tom’s mother Elena is, as he said, “a lost soul,” and Julia is probably going to jail for a long time for all this. Yet if there is anyone who could talk her way out of that, it is Swinton’s Julia Harris. What happens to her after the film ends is not too important. What does matter is that moment where she chooses the little boy and not the money; she can bring herself to do many terrible things, but not that.
Julia got some good reviews, most notably from Roger Ebert, Nick Davis, and my longtime sweetheart Keith Uhlich, and all the reviewers enjoyed describing the daring and size of Swinton’s performance, which still stands as her best or most ambitious. But no awards were won for it, and very few people saw the movie. In a Reddit thread in 2014 where she was asked what film of hers she felt was under-appreciated or overlooked, Swinton wrote this:
“Making films is such a long drawn-out business…there is the preparation (after the pre-preparation…which can be years) and then we shoot, cut, and look for distribution. I made a film with Erick Zonca called Julia of which I am extremely proud: in the United States it had a very small release by a great little and passionate distribution company called Magnolia…but there was only so wide they could release it…PLEASE look for that one…it is something else…and I LOVE it.”
Mike D’Angelo wrote a piece about Swinton in Julia recently, and this movie has all the makings of a cult classic. It plays even better and more damningly now as a portrait of American nerve, which used to be one of our strong suits, and how it can lead to ego distortions and very ugly results.
