Julia Review

Since its premiere at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival, Erick Zonca’s Julia has earned high praise from critics and the public alike with renowned film critic Roger Ebert calling it ‘a nerve-wracking thriller with a twisty plot and startling realism’.

The film, based on John Cassavetes’ 1980 movie Gloria, is a character study come ‘thriller’ about Julia, an alcoholic played by Tilda Swinton, who spends her days and nights drinking herself from nightclub to nightclub, and bed to bed.

That is until she meets Elena (Kate Del Castillo), a fellow Alcoholics Anonymous member with a crazy glint her eye. Driven to madness by the loss of her son Tom (Aidan Gould) to the boy’s wealthy grand father, she asks Julia to help her kidnap him. Spotting an opportunity to squeeze more cash from the Elena shaped cash cow, Julia kidnaps the boy herself and holds them both to ransom.

The first half of the film meanders along, concerning itself with establishing Julia’s drinking and social problems whilst the second half involves the kidnap. The film is two hours twenty four minutes long. It feels closer to three.

Switching from the neon, drunken hazes of Julia’s nightlife to the desolate emptiness of the Mexican border, everything looks visually impressive (thanks to the Director of Photography Yorick Le Saux, whose previous work includes Francois Ozon’s fantastic Swimming Pool), but the film is so poorly paced that it seems to drag and drag and drag some more before limping to its sudden, unsatisfying conclusion.

Tilda Swinton is good in conveying the attitudes and swagger of a woman who we cannot be sure sees the boy as a child or merely a fleshy bag of cash. Likewise, everything in the film is played realistically and does not seep into melodrama or mindless action sequences. Even a midnight helicopter chase is constructed via handheld cameras. It’s just the films pacing makes it difficult to care. You are fully aware that Swinton is having a good stab at it but the ‘it’ being stabbed is just not good enough.

The stand out scene in the movie is an attempt at the classic movie scenario where a character is required to collect illegal cash from a locker at an airport or station or any other location where every other member of the public looks suspiciously like an undercover cop. Unfortunately for Julia, a film needs more than one scene to live long in the memory and although the film picks up with the introduction of some troublesome Mexicans, its only twenty minutes of a much longer movie.

Tilda Swinton is a great actress (see I Am Love) but unfortunately Julia feels just as hung-over as it's title character for most of its running time. Still as slow as the movie is, it goes by like a flash compared to Swinton’s other foray into deathly slow paced cinema, Béla Tarr’s endurance testing The Man From London. Try both if you dare.