Word: julia
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...Julia is a mess. In her shiny green dress she staggers through a crowded L.A. bar, talking too loud, running her hand inside a man's shirt and saying, when asked by a stranger what she does, "I like to make people's dreams come true." The next morning she wakes up in the back seat of the stranger's car, he asleep next to her, and opens her mouth in a grimace of disdain, as if trying to spit out the memory of last night and all the other last nights. A 40-year-old alcoholic who keeps embarrassing...
...pale face under a crown of red hair, could mark her as this generation's russet Redgrave." Anyone who saw her made the comparison to an actress of similar height, looks, talent, famous family and attachment to left-wing causes - and who won an Oscar for another movie called Julia. Yet Vanessa Redgrave, behind her imposing facade, always suggested the shy vulnerability of a little girl lost, Swinton radiates a self-confidence that is commanding and commandeering; she could be any of her ancestors leading a charge on the battlefield...
...Julia is one of these sad, seemingly defective toys that manages to keep running after the battery's died. She swallows each drink as if it contains an acid that will cauterize what wounds her inside; or she could be embracing the habit because it brings on oblivion. Half the time she doesn't know the owner of the car or couch where she's been sleeping off her latest stupor. It might be her recovering-alcoholic friend Mitch (Saul Rubinek), who keeps trying to straighten her out. Or it might be her neighbor Elena (Kate del Castillo...
...addictions, alcoholism is the ugliest to watch, in a friend or on the screen. Which is probably why Zonca lavishes the first third of this two hour 40 minute intimate epic on a detailing of the disease. Then things get even more painful as Julia abducts the eight-year-old boy, locks him in her car trunk, ties him up and dopes him. And then she gets a maternal instinct, crashes her car through a U.S.-Mexican border wall and fights off a bunch of tough Latinos - all without taking a drop of her favorite beverage. At times Julia seems...
...there are rewards for the patient or masochistic viewer. If you get into the movie's unsteady rhythms, the experience can be an enthralling ordeal. That's because Swinton gives Julia, and Julia, all her power and coherence. It's like so much of Swinton's work: a huge star performance in an ornery little film. When she meets directors with grand or weird or disturbing ideas, she does make their dreams come true. We expect no less of the queen of the indies...