Why Tilda Swinton is the Queen of the Indies

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 herself out of gainful employment, the lead character of Erick Zonca’s Julia would seem a figure worth only pity or derision. But because she’s incarnated by uber-actress Tilda Swinton, Julia also merits awe. She’s not kidding when she says, “I have this unbelievable power over men.” Among discerning moviegoers, men and women alike.

The mass audience may have noticed this tall, titian-haired actress ornamenting some of the more ambitious mainstream films. In 2000, Swinton was the boss of a hippie commune who badgers Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach. Later she played a studio executive opposite Nicolas Cage in Adaptation and tried to explain the plot of Vanilla Sky to Tom Cruise. Fantasy fans remember her as the icy White Witch of the Narnia films and as the soaring, fallen Angel Gabriel tempting Keanu Reeves in Constantine. Recently, and notably, Swinton has had on-screen affairs with Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and George Clooney (Burn After Reading). She was also Clooney’s legal antagonist, an agribusiness executive, in Michael Clayton — a film that earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. (See pictures of Oscar’s leading ladies.)

But it’s in the art houses that Swinton, 48, reigns. Part of the renown comes from her aura: slim, pale and towering, keen of features and intellect, she invests her film characters with an imperious mien that some viewers want to mess with — but they can’t, because she’s been there first; she’s always willing to defile herself for her art. She brings a fearless commitment to all her movies, big and small, entertaining or dreadfully daunting; she’ll try anything and make it work. It’s a mystery how this bold, striking star-in-the-making avoided Hollywood’s eye for 15 years, but for off-Hollywood, off-kilter dramas, Swinton has been the go-to lass — the queen of the indies. (See a multi-media analysis of 78 years of Oscar by Richard Corliss.)

Anyway, some kind of royalty; it’s hers by birth. Swinton was born into a clan of warrior aristocrats whose Scottish home dates back to the ninth century (they supposedly earned the family name by clearing the area of wild boar), and who served prominently in every major British military and political skirmish for a thousand years. One recent ancestor invented the tank; another helped invent television. Over the millennium the Swintons were deeded huge swatches of prime Scottish real estate; Tilda’s father, Major-General Sir John Swinton, a.k.a. the Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire, lives in the family estate, Kimmerghame.

Katherine Matilda Swinton attended the poshest academies (Diana Spencer, later the Princess of Wales, was a classmate and friend at West Heath Girls‚ School) and took a political science degree at Cambridge. But she grew a spine, a rebellious streak, early; her privilege made her feel a displaced person. Acting was a calling that could blend her fiery Leftism with her pleasure in being looked at, so she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. Even that cutting-edge troupe was too establishment for Swinton. She starred in a miniseries based on Shelley’s Zastrozzi and did fringe theater, where she met the Scots playwright John Byrne, with whom she had twins and still lives. She also found a mentor, and soul-mate, in the gay avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman.

And Jarman found a swank, daring chameleonic muse; he would use Swinton in seven features. She was the Madonna in his The Garden and Queen Isabella in Edward II. She floated dead on a lake in Jarman’s Caravaggio and, unseen, read the dying director’s musings on mortality in Blue. After Jarman succumbed to AIDS in 1994, she mourned not only the his passing but his elliptical, confrontational style. “That kind of art is dead,” she said. “What you can do now is subvert with art that disguises itself as commerce.” That may sound like an admission of defeat, but for Swinton it was just a new stage in the war to make movies matter.

Sexy, But Which Sex?
An inspiration and patroness to adventurous young directors, especially women, Swinton made her American-film debut as a pan-sexually voracious attorney in Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions. Lynn Hershman-Leeson cast her as Lord Byron’s daughter Ada King, who devised an early computer, in Conceiving Ada, and, in Teknolust, as a geneticist who makes three copies of herself (you must see the trio dance together in kimonos). But it was Sally Potter’s Orlando, which Swinton helped raise the money for, that won the actress her sturdiest pre-Hollywood acclaim.

In this 1993 rethinking of the Virginia Woolf novel, Swinton plays Lord Orlando, a gallant 16th century nobleman whom Queen Elizabeth awards a stately manor, on one condition: “Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old.” Over his 400-year life, Orlando is a man, then a woman, then a bit of both — the two sexes evolved into one. Swinton had played men before: she was Mozart in a production of Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri, and in the play and film Man to Man she was a woman in Nazi Germany who assumes her dead husband’s identity. Once, at an airport security checkpoint, she was herded into the men’s line. With her short hair and lanky frame she can seem either gender, or the best of both — a super-androgyne with a sex appeal as complex as it is irresistible.

Reviewing Orlando in TIME, I lauded Swinton as “the pearl and perfection of any gender. Her poise and gravity, and the drama of her 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.

And this is where her artistry trumps her persona. Though the regal, haughty, alpha-female roles might come more easily to her, Swinton is no less convincing in less pedigreed parts. She won Golden Globe and Independent Spirit awards for The Deep End, as a middle-class mother frantically trying to protect her son and the status quo. And she’s scary-good as two underclass drabs: a fishwife having a torrid, ruinous affair with Ewan McGregor in Young Adam, or Bill Murray’s ex-girlfriend, now trailer trash, in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. (She also has a few moments in Jarmusch’s new film The Limits of Control.)

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), who has hatched a goofy plan to retrieve her estranged son Tom (Aidan Gould) — if only Julia will, sort of, kidnap him.

Of all 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 to have been made by a sloppy drunk, lurching down new narrative alleys, forgetting where it started, heedless to where it’s heading. Indeed, Zonca and Swinton have both called it “an alcoholic film.”

But 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.