Julia

Julia (2008) concerns the exploits of titular alcoholic (Tilda Swinton) as she kidnaps the young son of her neighbor out of financial desperation and addiction-fueled depravity. The ensuing hostage-taking journey reveals the dynamic between her and her victim, which is informed by both Julia's latent protective maternal instinct and the Stockholm Syndrome that afflicts the boy. The movie is perhaps most impressive in how seamlessly the kidnapping scheme escalates in violence and complexity. Swinton conveys Julia's incoherent moral compass by finding emotional truth in her idiotic and shrewd decisions alike, so that each degrading and/or dangerous situation arises as inevitably as the last. From no-mans-land lower-income suburban hell to the isolated southern Californian desert to the slums of Tijuana, the film's varied locations are fully realized, even as the tone remains stagnantly dour and hopeless. There is a great point in the film about the black hole of alcoholism in Julia's toxic mix of self-righteous indignation yet total evasion of personal responsibility ("do you see any bullet holes in you?" she rhetorically asks the boy to aggrandize her supposed protection of his safety). In a film that starkly explores human ugliness, Tilda Swinton's gameness, in spite of her innate elegance, to invest equal weight in Julia's sympathetic and hateful qualities fulfills the film's refreshing moral ambiguity.