Grandma (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                1 hr & 19 min, color, 2015

                                     

Lily Tomlin is like a scruffy cat; she has scampered and scratched and snarled her way through a long, exciting and distinguished career of oddball but loveable characters.  She has never had any pretense of glamour; she has created iconic female personalities in her own singular style with her slit-eyed countenance and her pouty lips and has won her shaggy-tailed place in hearts for over three generations of movie, TV and stage audiences.  I am so delighted to learn that the Screen Actors Guild is going to give her its Life Achievement Award next January.  She has earned it many times over.   And her wild, ferocious, snappy portrayal of the title role in “Grandma” caps that career for me, at least on the movie screen.  It is arguably her best work ever.  She is a force just about any teenager or adult would take pleasure in contending with.

                                     

Not that the film is basically comedic.  It is not exactly a wacky farce.  There are howls to be sure, but by and large it is a serious display of raw emotion, filtered though it be through outrageous shenanigans and confrontations that are bracing, often funny and quite heart stirring. 

                                     

The grandmother Tomlin plays is a woman named Elle in her seventies who happens to be a lesbian, and has had the misfortune of losing Vi, her cohabiting partner of almost forty years, by death.  At the opening scene she is giving her college age lover of four months Olivia (Judy Greer) her walking papers.  She does it in a very cold, dismissive tone, and it is obvious that the girl is totally devastated as well as surprised.  Elle is crude, vulgar, foul-mouthed and almost malicious.  It takes little perception to see that the young lover is not really her enemy; this senior citizen is doing battle with internal conditions and outward circumstances that we are yet to have revealed.  What is going on with this woman?  Could nothing but grief provoke this kind of behavior?  It may be difficult to believe that by film’s end she will emerge as a very caring individual.  That is the wonder worked in the perceptive and fluid screenplay by Paul Weitz, who is also the director.

                                     

Three generations of womanhood in one family get entangled with each other.  Elle and her daughter (Marcia Gay Harden) have been on the outs for quite some time, and into the picture creeps the teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner).  The girl pays Elle a visit announcing that she is pregnant and prevails upon Elle for money to pay for the abortion she is scheduled for later that same day, after her boyfriend fails to come up with it.  She is too ashamed and afraid to call on her alarmist mother for help (more about her in a moment), imagining that she will be thrown out of the house.  In addition to other problems that have made Elle’s life a torment she must inform the girl that she is broke, but she sets out with Sage in tow through the streets of LA to find a willing friend from whom she can borrow the money.  Their circuitous journey brings Elle into thunderous confrontations with supposed friends who either refuse to help or are unable to.  Most heartbreaking of them is an appeal to a lover of a half century before.  Sam Elliott portrays him, and he is a forceful presence in the one scene in which he appears.

                                     

The classic image of grandmother-hood has been stripped away before.  I recall the 1979 comedy “Parenthood” in which Diane Weist, a woman in her forties, is informed by her teenage daughter that she is going to give birth out of wedlock sometime in the coming months.  After a spell, when her shock has been sufficiently absorbed, she contemplates what this will mean for herself.  Someone spells it out for her – that she is about to become a grandmother.  Her first reaction is resistance.  She declares that this could not possibly be true.  Me, a grandmother!  Grandmothers are matronly old ladies.  They bake pies and cakes and have their offspring’s offspring visit them as subjects would pay homage to royalty.  They do not visit; they are visited and honored as senior citizens by the larger family.  Her question to herself and all listeners is a challenge: How can I fill that kind of role?  After all, “I was at Woodstock”.    

                                     

That moment was just a warm-up for what Tomlin gives us.  Her Grandma is far from royalty of any kind and is anything but a settled, poised and self-respecting matriarch of wisdom.  She is bitterly candid; she has no trouble with broadside insults; she is not even averse to physical combat.  In one outrageous scene she and Sage pay the father of Sage’s unborn baby a visit and when he tries to deny paternity, she literally beats him up, leaving him crumpled in the floor in agony.  Tact and decorum are foreign to her.  But it does not take long for it to begin to be evident that she is a fighter who will go to bat for someone she loves.  And there is no sign of any patriarch anywhere.  She is a solo flyer who has not always made the best choices for herself.  Her one night stand with a man years before resulted in her own pregnancy, the man disappearing from her life.  She is a poet who in the wake of her lover’s death has lost touch with her muse as well.  Her path is bestrewn with wreckage.   

                                     

The daughter, the mid-generation figure, does not appear until most of the way through the scenario, but within minutes we see enough to understand Sage’s fear of her that has led to her calling upon the grandmother instead.  She is an equally candid, chip-on-the-shoulder individual who despite her handsome face and neat professional appearance looks as if she would have no trouble pecking out somebody’s eyes.  Like mother, like daughter!  Of the three women Sage emerges as the most sane and well-tempered.  She inadvertently turns out to be the catalyst that brings mother and grandmother to belated though cautious terms with each other.  The closing moments of the film are priceless!

                                     

But though the three all come powerfully to life, Tomlin’s Grandma is unmistakably in the driver’s seat all the way.  While Garner and Harden do exceptionally good work, Tomlin is given more leeway in the script for nuance.  Her Grandma’s destiny I never ceased to regard as the most vital for me.  Maybe that is because I myself am a senior citizen faced with aging angst, with nothing left to do to help shape the lives of growing children, even though I do not have her brash, indelicate nature or her regret over past loves and lost labors.  Elle has layers, and they peel back one at a time to show us just how complicated her struggling life really is and how big the heart that beats underneath her uncouthness.  

                                     

This is a real jewel.  It speaks to all of us participants in the ongoing human comedy/drama!      

                                     

It helps, if the viewer is Pro-Choice; the movie is nothing short of that.  The scene in the abortion clinic is almost a story unto itself.   About that I will discreetly say no more.  But if that issue is not an issue for you, you are in for a treat.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.