By Kurt Brokaw

Up on the big screen, chronic female alcoholics do the same stupid, dangerous things as guys. They steal inedible ears of corn from urban LA street gardens (Faye Dunaway in “Barfly”). They nuzzle and rub up against men while their own husbands watch (Elizabeth Taylor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”). They fall through glass shower doors (Meg Ryan in “When A Man Loves A Woman”). They pass out dropping lit cigarettes on rugs that burn down the house (Susan Hayward in “Smash-Up: The Story of A Woman”). They sleep in junkyard cars in freezing winter and die of tumors (Meryl Streep in “Ironweed”).

If you’ve seen these movies and want more, you may be ready for “Julia” – perhaps the most harrowing drama of a low-bottom blackout drunk, female or male, you’ve ever watched. It’s an acute demonstration – maybe the best ever put on film – of how alcohol fuels obsession. If you’ve lived it, you’ll instantly recognize and appreciate its power.

Julia, the title character here, played by a ferocious Tilda Swinton, spends most of this movie hauling a kidnapped boy from San Diego through Mexico, desperately hoping for a fortune in ransom from the child’s grandfather. Remember that sequence in “The Lost Weekend” when Ray Milland lugs his typewriter all the way up Third Avenue to Harlem, desperately trying to find a pawnshop that’s open (it’s a Jewish holiday) so he can pawn it for a fifth of rye? Like Milland’s typewriter 60 years ago, the kid is a bag of money. The difference, and it’s a huge difference, is that Julia begins to develop a protective instinct – call it the beginning of a drunkard’s love – for the kid.

RECKLESS CHARM IGNITED BY BOOZE
The setup for this relentless, exhausting chase drama is carefully mapped out by the French director Erich Zonca and his co-writer Aude Py. Julia starts out as a real estate agent who’s fired for her drinking and boisterous one-night stands. A co-worker who’s a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, Mitch (Saul Rubinek), tells her she’s a “full-blown suicidal, blind alcoholic” and how at the end of his own drinking he ended up assaulting his child. Julia watches part of a meeting, but it’s clear she’s nowhere near ready to quit drinking.

The other key AA member she meets, Elena (a wild-eyed Kate del Castillo), wants desperately to reunite with her 8-year-old son Tom (Aidan Gould), who’s living with his wealthy grandfather, a man who’s identified in news stories as an “electronics kingpin.” When Elena learns the boy will be on a picnic with a male caregiver, she promises Julia $50,000 if she gets a gun and kidnaps him. And so Julia does, locking the child in her trunk and then deliberately running over the caregiver – not once, but twice, leaving him in a coma.

As the police comb the terrain for Julia and Tom, we watch her drinking half-pints as well as fifths. The hard liquor ignites and powers her reckless charm, fearlessness, and endless resourcefulness in pulling off this lunatic stunt. As the ransom for the boy grows to two million dollars, there’s never a moment in which you pity Julia; she’s a smart, wily drunk and she can snap-to almost as fast as she passes out. It’s certainly possible you may find yourself starting to identify with her, against all your better instincts.

Like Streep, Cate Blanchett and Laura Linney, Swinton is a chameleon – she never looks or sounds like any other character she’s played. Writing in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis (one of two chief film critics) saluted Swinton as a “magnificent, bold, sometimes viscerally uncomfortable screen presence, with an otherworldly alabaster glow and a piercing gaze that seems to nail you to your seat.” Dargis wrote that Swinton should have received an Oscar nomination. The supporting cast, particularly Aidan Gould as the gamely obedient boy who rarely withers under all of Julia’s threats and diatribes, is first-rate. The picture doesn’t feel anywhere near two hours and twenty minutes.

In the September/October 2010 edition of Together my essay on films of alcoholism and addiction divided these motion pictures into three distinct categories: films in which the alcoholic/addict dies…or recovers through the love of a spouse or child…or begins recovery through AA or institutional treatment. “Julia,” released in 2009 and available on DVD, is a hybrid, in that we never know whether Julia will stop drinking, let alone whether she’ll get away with murder. Yet the picture has a curiously satisfying conclusion. It’s not a victory over the drink, but there are signs of strength and hope in a woman who was running on empty. Like its unruly, brilliant star, “Julia” doesn’t play by the rules, but then, how many drunks do?

In 1977 the British writer/director Mike Leigh cast his wife and leading lady of seven films, Alison Steadman, as the drunk in the BBC drama, “Abigail’s Party.” It became a riveting stage play, recently revived on Broadway with Jennifer Jason Leigh. It’s a close-up portrait of a gin-and-tonic boozer on a one-night binge that ends up with her jittery, rageaholic, status-obsessed husband suffering a fatal heart attack and dying in front of her and their party guests. The original BBC telecast is on Water Bearer Films video, and is a Brit version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor), as both examine collapsing marriages over one drunken night.

The same year Leigh filmed “Abigail’s Party,” he began working with a 22-year-old newcomer, Lesley Manville. Over three decades later, Manville has appeared in numerous Leigh films and just won 2010 Best Actress from The National Board of Review for her role in “Another Year,” the director’s second go-round on female alcoholism. This one’s just as raw and unsparing because Lesley Manville is every bit the equal of her predecessor, Ms. Steadman. “Another Year” is spread out over four seasons so we get to study a drunk spiraling down, down and almost out, glass by glass.

LESS THINKING, MORE DRINKING
Lesley plays Mary, an aging, wrinkling secretary with blond streaks and blackening roots who works in a mental health clinic. We learn she’s divorced, maybe more than once, and hungry for a man because time’s running out. In her first scene she’s having lunch with her friend Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a clinical psychologist, and finishing off a bottle of wine as she eyes a stranger at the entrance. In her second scene she visits Gerri and her geologist husband Tom (Jim Broadbent), a middle class couple with a knowledge and appetite for good wine, and passes out on their guest bed.

You can see where “Another Year” is headed, season-by-season and disaster-by-disaster.
In the next scenes Mary veers between Gerri and Tom’s perky lawyer son, who spoils any plans Mary might have by turning up with his own saucy health professional girlfriend, and Ken (Peter Wight), a sweaty, obese bear of a man who gulps down glasses of wine, throws back 40-ouncers and wears a tee emblazoned “Less Thinking, More Drinking,” in case we weren’t aware he’s an alkie, too. Ken’s m.o. is being lost in a pop-culture world he neither likes nor pretends to understand. Mary is even initially attracted to this hulking train wreck until he tries a clumsy move on her in her car. In the end Mary is left with a blinding hangover contemplating Tom’s brother, a newly widowed beer-drinking stoic in his 70s. The camera holds tight on Mary’s ravaged, bewildered face a long, long time before we take a slow fade to black.

Lesley Manville has said that this final shot was the hardest take, summarizing “a lifetime of pain, loneliness and resignation without uttering a sound.” It is all of that, and “Another Year” is as bleakly despairing if not as shocking as “Abigail’s Party” with all its fury and rage. There’s no question Mike Leigh has a probing, clinician’s eye and ear for capturing the sights, sounds and smells of active alcoholism. The performances are brave and achingly believable.

While “Julia” gives us a couple of rays of hope, even if they’re false, for its unruly heroine, the only place Mary is going in “Another Year” is toward her next drink and the grave.

Kurt Brokaw is Associate Teaching Professor at The New School and senior film critic for The Independent (Independent-Magazine.org).