Muriel Award: Best Actress
This one, I truly did not see coming. Before the votes started rolling in, Paul and I were discussing who we thought would win, and while I expressed admiration for this particular performance, I didn’t know if enough voters would have seen it to make a difference. Frankly, I didn’t even predict this woman to hit the top five, let alone take the category. And yet here she is, winning this category by a fairly healthy margin, mainly because she received an extraordinary number of first-place votes - more first-place votes than anyone in any non-decade category not named Christoph Waltz. One of those first-place votes was myself, so might I say that this feels wholly deserved, and I’m damn glad to be proven wrong. So, without further ado, here’s your Best Actress winner:
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Wait. No, no, no, that’s not right. Dammit… where’d I put that… musta gotten my notes mixed up…
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Ah! Here it is:
Tilda Swinton, Julia [134 points/18 votes]
“Tilda Swinton doesn’t just chew up scenery in Julia—she goes on a Joan Crawford by way of Godzilla-style rampage that is as comically shrill as it is absolutely commanding. As a desperate woman on the lam with money problems and a kidnapped kid in tow, Swinton never lets you feel comfortable enough to know if you should laugh at, be fearful of or sympathize with her. She barrels through scene after scene looking like she were wired with some new kind of methamphetamine powerful enough to energize a legion of truckers. A whirlwind of bulldozer grace and wide-eyed aggression, Swinton dares you to lose interest in her character so she has an excuse to shove you in a trunk and yell at you. Do what the lady says and bask in the warm glow of this TKO performance. She’s not bluffing and that trunk is decidedly uncomfortable.” - Simon Abrams
“Actors are often complimented for resisting the urge to soften or sentimentalize hard characters. In Julia, Tilda Swinton gives a fearless performance of a woman so coarse and mean that to suggest that she might have had any sentimental urges to resist seems insulting. There’s no glamour here, no wink to the wise; Swinton makes her mean, the kind of woman who would kidnap a kid and brutalize him without reservation if it meant a healthy payday. Her face pretty with a smile and rough with a scowl, Swinton’s Julia is the sort of boozehound who will screw a man at dusk and curse him at dawn, her volatility linked to the amount of alcohol in the system.
Like fellow master thespian Jeff Bridges’ great career performance this year, the film rests solely on Swinton’s shoulders, and follows an alcoholic character as they make a grasp for something better. The difference is that while Bridges’ Bad Blake is a nice enough fellow who’s resting in his own hole, Julia is a nasty drunken slut who lunges not for love or self-improvement, but the means to drown more extravagantly. She doesn’t seek to commit harm but when that’s the way to get to her dollars, hesitation is nowhere to be found.
It’s a balancing act to execute an example of acting this good; Julia’s so desperate and pathetic she stupidly blunders into one conundrum after another, but the woman’s shrewd and tough enough to punch through the problems intact. Julia’s road leads only to a brick wall, so it says a lot that this woman can steer the car so that the route to the crash isn’t the shortest one. For most of the film, her pathos comes not from any sign of kindness, but through our recognition that this is one viciously tough bird, deserving of a begrudging respect even as she’s easy to revile. Swinton understands the bundle of contradictions that compose even the most broken person, so by the time that some sliver of a maternal instinct has broken through the nastiness and Julia makes a sincere effort to save the life of her young victim, she has convinced us that the perverse but genuine affection was as unavoidable. There’s a memorable moment where Julia,
naked in bed after a bender, playfully embraces the boy Tom (Aidan Gould), a moment that’s sublime in its maternal intimacy even as the circumstance doesn’t let us forget the creepiness. A less skilled actress might leave us with doubts, but Swinton convinces us that the perverse but genuine affection was inevitable. Her depravity ensures that the ending she gets is the happiest one that we could have hoped for: the revelation that she’s not a total monster, after all.” - James Frazier
Runners-up:
Melanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds [119/18]
Carey Mulligan, An Education [80/13]
Charlotte Gainsbourg, Antichrist [71/10]
Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia [63/10]
