Butler's Cinema Scene

Julianne Moore, John Turturro

“GLORIA BELL” My rating: B-

102 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Julianne Moore elevates every film she’s in, and she’s pretty much the reason to see “Gloria Bell,” an American remake by Sebastian Lelio of his 2013 Chilean drama “Gloria.”

As the title character — a middle-aged divorcee whose main pleasure is hanging around L.A.’s retro disco dance clubs with other folk her age   — Moore hides behind outsized glasses and a semi-mousey makeup job…neither of which begin to hide her star quality.

Gloria’s fixation on ’80s dance music — she’s in constant singalong mode whenever cruising with the car radio — softens the hard edges of her life.

She’s been single for a dozen years. Her son (Michael Cera) is currently a solo dad (his wife apparently has abandoned the family);  her daughter (Caren Pistorius) is in a long-distance romance with an extreme surfer from Sweden.  Neither offspring seems particularly warm toward her.

She works at an insurance company where her specialty is coddling customers shaken by auto accidents.

The script by Lelio and Alice Johnson Boher is a love story…sorta.  Alice meets newly divorced Arnold (John Tuturro) at a dance club where he stares at her from afar and defuses her sullen mood by asking if she’s always so happy.

He woos Alice with  paintball (he owns a paintball preserve; she turns out to be a dead shot) and their shared love of boogying down on the dance floor. And he reads funny/romantic poetry to her.

But there’s a problem. Arnold cannot break away from his needy ex and their even more needy daughters.  He’s at their mercy day and night, and it doesn’t take Alice long to figure out she’s always going to be a runner up in the race for his affections.

“Grow a pair,” she tells him.

To be truthful, I kinda wish “Gloria Bell” would grow a pair. Because in its American incarnation the story seems so dour and joyless that it undermines the romance at the film’s core.  The whole idea of a love story is to allow us to vicariously share that special thrill…and here the thrill never arrives.

Part of it is because Turturro gives away too much too soon.  There’s something kinda hinkey about Arnold from the get-go; we’re way more suspicious of  him than our leading lady is.

But even more dismaying is the way the film stacks the deck against our heroine. Everywhere we look there’s something grim, from the unseen upstairs neighbor who keeps Gloria awake at night screaming at his demons to the stunted emotional lives of her children to a fellow insurance worker (the great Barbara Sukowa, wasted) waiting for the ax to fall in the latest round of layoffs.

Nor does the strong cast of recognizable supporting players (Brad Garrett, Rita Wilson, Chris Mulkey, Holland Taylor, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Sean Astin) much elliven matters.

And so the weight of the film falls upon the capable shoulders of Moore. And she’s more than up to the task, spectacularly watchable both in her character’s emotional vulnerability and, later on, in her fierce independence.  Few actresses — and none of Moore’s age — more fearlessly bare their emotions and bodies for the camera.

One has to wonder if writer/director Lilio — whose last two films were “Disobedience” (about a gay woman in an Orthodox Jewish community) and the Oscar-winning “A Fantastic Woman” (about a Chilean transgender woman) — is still finding his sea legs when it comes to filming in English.

All too often “Gloria Bell” feels exactly like what it is…an uncomfortable translation.

| Robert W. Butler