We’ve long been intrigued by the notion of our Older Self being able to step back in time, and personally reassure our Younger Self that everything will turn out just fine.
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| Gloria Steinem (Julianne Moore, left) and Bella Abzug (Bette Midler) chortle over some of the reactions to a recent issue of Ms. Magazine. |
Director/co-scripter Julie Taymor cleverly exploits this beguiling premise in The Glorias, her adaptation — alongside co-writer Sarah Ruhl — of Gloria Steinem’s 2015 memoir, My Life on the Road.
Love her or loathe her, one must acknowledge that Steinem carved out an impressively ambitious career, despite humble and disorientingly peripatetic origins. Taymor — an eclectic filmmaker known for her boldly unique approaches to varied projects such as Frida, Across the Universe and her gender-switching version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest — employs different actresses to depict four primary “pivot points” in Steinem’s life.
As her defiantly non-linear narrative bounces back and forth in time, these four selves occasionally meet and discuss what has transpired, or will transpire. Such encounters are filmed in dreamlike, soft-focus monochrome, always while traveling, and usually on a Greyhound bus whose windows look out upon a different time and place: an easy metaphor for the notion that life is a journey, with each stop far more important than the eventual destination.
Youngest Gloria (doe-eyed Ryan Kiera Armstrong) is enchanted by her irrepressible, irresponsible but flamboyantly theatrical father, Leo (Timothy Hutton), a huckster and charlatan forever keeping his family one step ahead of the previous town’s creditors. Despite the profoundly negative affect this has on his wife, Ruth (Enid Graham), Leo nonetheless inspires Gloria to recognize that travel is the best possible education.
Hutton is excellent: totally persuasive as a silver-tongued con artist who nonetheless knows, in his heart, that he’s destined to disappoint all the people he loves.
Twelve-year-old Gloria (Lulu Wilson), solemn beyond her years, is faced with the challenge of caring for her mentally fragile mother, after Leo abandons his family. With Ruth sliding ever deeper into chronic despair, Gloria soon understands how important it is for a woman to be able to make her own way in the world, without being beholden to a husband. We see the resolve in Wilson’s gaze.
There’s also a telling conversation, when Gloria discovers that her mother had once been a writer and reporter … forced to work behind a male byline. And we realize, from our contemporary remove, that Gloria would grow up to live her mother’s unlived life. (And how often, I wonder, does a child honor a parent in such an unspoken fashion?)
Wilson also enjoys one of this film’s most magical moments, when she briefly befriends a little girl, and follows her into a barbershop; the two tap-dance, to the delight of barbers and customers, Gloria oblivious to the unspoken “rule” that East Toledo white girls shouldn’t hang out in Black barbershops.
“This conveyed my experience,” Steinem observes, in this film’s press notes, “that Black communities seemed more accepting of children.”
All of these “young Gloria” settings and sequences are given an old-school, mildly romantic appearance by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto: somewhat reflecting Leo’s wanderlust spirit. (Later sequences, shadowing the adult Glorias, adopt more of a documentary-style intensity.)
Alicia Vikander — delivering a perfect Midwestern accent — has the plum role as post-college Gloria: the young woman whose experiences shape the social, racial and gender warrior she’s destined to become. She’s introduced while boarding a train at the start of her two-year travel fellowship throughout India; her female companions are surprised — and pleased — by the notion that a “rich American woman” would choose to sit with them, rather than in the first-class car.
These sequences in this train compartment, as Vikander’s Gloria so graciously charms her companions, once again reveal Taymor’s gift for obtaining naturalistic performances.
This Gloria, inspired by Gandhi, seeks out and is invited to join a female “talking circle” in a village ravaged by caste riots. Their horror stories of (often sexual) violence have a profound effect on her, Vikander’s expression hardening into the same resolve we also note in Wilson’s gaze, at a similarly revelatory moment.
We chafe and gnash teeth when Vikander’s Gloria — admittedly gorgeous, Taymor and the actress making no effort to conceal this (and why should they?) — begins her journalism career. This is the very early 1960s, and she’s a rare female presence in an entirely male bullpen, stifled by early editors who resist her requests to work on serious stories, and asked by “colleagues” to make the coffee.
Vikander persuasively conveys Gloria’s growing vexation over the disconnect between the way she wishes to be perceived, and the way she IS perceived. This is brilliantly depicted in the aftermath of her 1963 exposé of Playboy clubs — “A Bunny’s Tale” — which she wrote for Show magazine, after spending several weeks as an undercover Bunny.
Rather than being lauded for this groundbreaking bit of investigative journalism, she’s merely regarded as a Bunny.
She nonetheless perseveres, and in 1968 joins the writing staff of the newly founded New York Magazine. Although the assignments get better, she remains strait-jacketed by an editor unwilling to tackle hot-button issues such as abortion and the rapidly rising feminist movement.
At which point, roughly halfway through the film, Vikander gives way to Julianne Moore — glimpsed only briefly, up to this point — as the mature Gloria. The film’s narrative also becomes more linear.
It’s interesting to compare these two. Although both are excellent, there’s a sense that Moore’s approach is more of a deliberate impersonation — in other words, as an actress playing a role — whereas Vikander slides more smoothly into Steinem’s skin, as if she is Gloria.
We meet the women who play further key roles in the shaping of Steinem’s career. Janelle Monáe is powerfully soft-spoken as Dorothy Pitman Hughes, who with Dolores Huerta (Monica Sanchez) helps Gloria overcome severe, tongue-tied stage fright, to become an effective public speaker.
Kimberly Guerrero is terrific as Wilma Mankiller, the Cherokee activist and social worker who rises to become the first woman elected to serve as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Bette Midler, still a force of nature, is a hoot ’n’ a holler as lawyer and social activist Bella Abzug (“Battling Bella”), who with Steinem and others co-founds the National Women’s Political Caucus.
Viewers hoping to hear Steinem’s most infamous, and oft-quoted one-liner, won’t be disappointed … although you may be surprised by who says it (wholly accurate, as per Steinem’s memoir).
Taymor and Ruhl bring us all the way to the aftermath of the 2016 election, at which point we can’t help feeling let down: both by those results, and by the ongoing failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, launched with such promise in 1972.
But even here, Steinem displays her savvy pragmatism, during a speech delivered at the Women’s March of 2017: “Remember, the Constitution does not begin with ‘I, the President,’ ” she stirringly proclaims. “It begins with ‘We, the People.’ ”
Although Taymor’s cross-cutting between the multiple Glorias is clever and engaging, some of her other affectations are off-putting and just plain bizarre: most notably the abrupt animated inserts accompanying the arrival of Ms. magazine’s first issue (and cover illustration); and the spin-out following a television interviewer’s rather insensitive comment.
Indeed, every time we settle into the film’s rhythm, and get truly involved with these characters, Taymor yanks us out with more weirdness. She can’t get out of her own way.
She and editor Sabine Hoffman should have tightened this mildly overlong 139-minute production, particularly to eliminate such self-indulgent frippery. That would have done much to transform this very good film into an excellent one.
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