Rating out of 5: * * * *
Verdict: Acting this good is rare.
The title of this film is a clue that it's a homage to John Cassavetes' 1980 film Gloria, which was also about a woman on the run with a kid who's not her own. But this extortion thriller, a serious white-knuckle ride, is every inch its own film.
The work of French director Zonca, whose feature debut was the sublime The Dreamlife of Angels 10 years ago, it's not a faultless piece of work, but it's distinguished by a dazzling title-role performance by Swinton.
Her Julia Harris is a woman seriously under the influence: her only friend Mitch (Rubin) tells her, she's "an out-of-control, suicidal, blind alcoholic" and Zonca shows us her life in LA as a succession of shadowy bars and starkly sunlit hungover mornings in which she wakes with her skirt around her hips.
Like all the best drunks, she shrugs off responsibility - "This happens to me sometimes," she says with a wan smile - preferring to believe that life just keeps dealing her bad hands.
Things look up when Julia's plainly demented neighbour Elena (Del Castillo) makes her a lucrative proposal: to help kidnap her son back from the rich grandfather who has custody of the boy. Unsurprisingly, things go wrong, but nothing prepares us for quite how wrong.
The plot line may seem improbable at times, but Zonca is alive to the messy unpredictability of criminal endeavour. A lot of the movie, which is a sort of black comedy of errors, consists of blundering around and waiting, and as a result it's looser and longer than it ought to be. There's a sense, too, that it ends when Zonca doesn't quite know where to take it. Certainly the last line makes no sense at all given what's gone before and as redemption narrative the outcome is shaky at best.
But it's easy to forgive anything in a film built around such a spellbinding performance. In underrated films (Caravaggio, The War Zone) and in the American arthouse mainstream (Michael Clayton, The Deep End, Stephanie Daley), Swinton has long impressed as an actress of consummate craft and huge emotional range. Her work here as a woman just this side of a meltdown is certain to rank among the very best performances of this or any year. It's far from an easy watch, but it shouldn't be missed.
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Saul Rubinek, Kate Del Castillo, Aidan Gould, Jude Ciccolella, Bruno Bichir
Director: Erick Zonca
Running time: 138 mins
Rating: M Contains violence and offensive language.
