I had high hopes or this movie because its directed by Erick Zonca, who made The Dreamlife of Angels, a poetic and gritty film that I watched around the time
that it came out. Back then, being in my early 20s and not having that many movies under my belt, the film made a deep impression on me. Europe was making a lot of neorealist,
documentary-esque type films. The Dardennes Brothers were making their films, it wasn’t quite a movement, but like Dogme 95 there was this sense that people wanted
fly-on-the-wall authenticity with a touch of tragedy. They wanted a glimpse of a lost, floundering, and marginalized generation of young Europeans in dead-end suburbs. I hardly remember what happened in Dreamlife now, but I remember thinking that if Zonca made that film, then Julia ought to be worth watching as well.
Julia proves that ZOnca is still an auteur of grit, but I can’t say that I liked the movie all that much. When you’ve got these character-driven movies, you necessarily have to let the audience spend some time with the character, in order to get to know them. Sometimes there is very relevant plot and character information imparted to us, and
other times we’re just given impressions, nuances and inflections, glances and passing expressions that tell us about what a character is like, what they would or not would not
do to change their situation, etc. And although it can seem all arty and pointless, it really isn’t — because the more the filmmakers can tell us about a character, the more credence there is to their outlandish actions in the rest of the movie.
Tilda Swinton is a great actress, but there was something about her performance in Julia that rubbed me the wrong way. The fallen woman as hero — well that’s nothing new — but how to play that role in an interesting way? That’s a challenge for any actor, even one as gifted as Swinton. There’s a requisite amount of trashiness and debauchery that has to be shown, you have to see her hungover, you have to see her strung out, you have to see her get taken advantage of by some men, you have to see her get fired. YOu can argue that all these scenes are necessary, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like them.
The problem is that Swinton over plays the character. She’s not American, and though she does the accent fairly well, there’s something rather forced about the way she cusses and sputters. Compare this to Amy Ryan’s performance in Gone Baby Gone, where she plays deadbeat mother Helene McCready. Not having seen Ryan before, we were convinced this woman might have been pulled off the mean streets of south Boston just for this role. It felt that real — the accent (Ryan is from Queens), the mannerisms, the way she cussed. I hate to be such a stickler about things like this, but knowing that the film takes place in LA and Mexico, you expect something real about it. The language somehow interfered with the rest of Swinton’s performance; we love methody performances, but someone — and ideally, it would have been Zonca — should have told her to tune it down or somehow achieved similar effect in the cutting room. Someone suggested to me that her character might not be from the US, a thought which had not occurred to me, but could very well be true. I suppose that when you see a white person with a plainly American accent living LA, you assume they are born and bred Americans, or something close to it.
As for the story of the film, which involves Julia kidnapping a boy, holding him hostage for ransom money, and then fleeing to Mexico when they find her out — well, if that happened in a TV show, we wouldn’t be surprised, so we were happy to suspend disbelief for this part of the movie. However, one of the main parts of this section is to show how a boy growing up without a mother somehow finds a surrogate mother in Julia, and how Julia, emotionally benumbed and hardened as she is, develops a soft spot for this kid, starts to care about him. I get the point of this, but again, it’s just not worked up to in the right way. There’s no sleight-of-hand to make you believe the illusion, it’s just put out there.
I read an interesting perspective on the character of Julia on Film Brain/Like Anna Karina’s Sweater:
Julia’s downward spiral from mere alcoholic to felony fugitive is all well and good, and like Cassavetes, Zonca doesn’t analyze her subjectivity – we’re constantly forced to re-examine our assessment of her. However, what’s missing is the undeniable humanism of Cassavetes, which found its way into all of his warts-and-all characters. More than Gloria, Julia is closer in spirit to Cosmo Vitelli – another down-on-his-luck character who resorts to a desperate act as means of survival. Yet Zonca doesn’t plunge deep enough to properly explore the insecurity, alienation, etc. – the things that make her all-too-human – and she comes off as too much of an absolute, a thing Cassavetes’ strove to avoid. The desperation is there, but she lacks the malleability of just about all his characters. Though much like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Julia manages to succeed as a character-driven study contained within the framework of a genre film.”
I don’t know this blogger’s name, but I agree that, Killing of a Chinese Bookie was much more fleshed out. However, that movie was also a lot longer. My problem wasn’t with the fact that she was vitriolic and hateful, or that there is nothing redeeming about her. That sounds like hogwash that, as the blogger suggests, people overly concerned with the bottom line and with little appreciation for film artistry will say. My main problem was just that the acting, however bold, just didn’t sit well with me. Elena, the messed up Mexican woman that comes up with the original harebrained scheme to kidnap the kid (her son), is terrible as well. I know crazy people often, well, go crazy — but this whole alkie and batshit crazy milieu sometimes just gets so hackneyed.
Reading through the rest of that blogger’s post, it’s sad to hear what the other distributors at the Berlinale had to say. That’s why we jumped at the chance to see this movie in Paris. I am sure it’ll pop up on DVD in Shanghai, but fat chance most of my compatriots in the US are going to see it — at least not easily.
