If you can imagine Tilda Swinton in Beyond the Forrest-Bette Davis mode, playing the Bogart part (ie: an unapologetic drunk whose law evasion comes full circle to heroism) in a present-day border-crossing noir that slowly transforms into a fear-of-difference mother melodrama after an unintentional detour to Tijuana, then you’re some way towards being able to wrap your head around Erick Zonca’s Julia, opening this Friday a year-plus after its world premiere in 2008 at Berlin. Swinton plays the titular far-gone drunk, a tough broad past her prime but able to turn on what’s left of her charm when circumstances demand it. Within ten minutes of meeting Julia, we watch her lose her job at a real estate office thanks to “a drink … or two … at lunch”, and continue to booze her way into a number of compromising positions, each one leaving her further dependent on the kindness of the various strangers who are in the vicinity when she comes to. Most don’t exhibit any, which might be one reason why Julia has become convinced that she’s a victim of a cruel world and not her own bad habits.

Who or whatever is to blame, beyond the ability to control herself and too desperately wedged in the current moment to care about the next, Julia slides into LA’s underbelly of criminals and crazies (roughly the same milieu of Crank 2, but quieter and with less public sex). Julia gets by to the degree she does largely thanks to the not-tough-enough love of Mitch, a former drunk who tells a horror story about drunkenly losing his wife and child, and promises his apathetic wannabe inamorata that if she keeps on the way she’s going, one day, she’ll lose it all, too.

It doesn’t seem like much of a threat at the time, when all Julia has is Mitch, who she insists she doesn’t need, but she makes an appearance at an AA meeting to placate him nonetheless. There she meets Elena (Kate Del Castillo), an obviously too-intense woman who tries to rope Julia into a plot to kidnap her young son from his super-wealthy grandfather and take him back to her homeland of Mexico. Julia might be, as Mitch claims, so self-deluded that she can’t tell she’s suicidal, but next to Elena she looks half-rational and in control. Desperate for cash, Julia takes Elena’s hysterical babble at face value and decides to play the part offered in the plot, but to spin it into “the double cross of a lifetime.”

This is the way Julia talks, and it’s a cue to the way she acts: as if playing a role in a movie of her own making, that exists only to her. Swinton crafts a performance based on tiny ritual, down to the way Julia’s mouth seems to wake before her eyes, her tongue stretching out to draw fresh air into a mouth surely sticky with stale booze. Zonca is similarly meticulous with providing atmospheric detail to show Julia’s disconnection from the practical world: showing the burn marks left by forgotten cigarettes on the side of her bathtub, staging a halcyonic moment in a certain quality of light and then devoting the entire next scene to showing Swinton exploring the source of that light, thereby literally losing a plot development happening just outside the room. At about two hours twenty minutes, Julia is long by any metric, but its slow bread crumb disbursement pays off in one of the film’s last scenes, when Julia is told that she’s “dangerous”, and we realize that somehow, at a point unplaceable, we’ve begun to feel otherwise in spite of most visible evidence.
That Julia is a film that convinces the viewer to sympathize with and even cheer on a woman who behaves very badly puts it squarely within that Beyond the Forrest, noirodrama tradition. Though its surface is much rougher and less sentimental, Julia fundamentally corresponds to a certain strain of women’s picture, spinning on the moment where it looks like our heroine will get away with various transgressions — a theft, an affair, a big lie, often two out of three — and we root for her to do so, only to see her thrown into some kind of agonizing struggle, one that keeps her down in the name of maintaining the social order, but ultimately allows for a kind of more moral (and thus, far less fun) redemption. This is both the film’s most compelling driving force and ultimately its biggest weakness. Julia’s journey out of solipsism totally evades junkie movie cliches … until it doesn’t. It’s very odd that a film so willing to go so thrillingly far off the rails thematically ultimately sends its leading lady down the rather trite path of discovering a long-drowned maternal instinct. It continues to traffic in shock value until the bitter end, but somewhere down the line, Julia swaps its transgressive spark for a much more old-fashioned kind of satisfaction.