Butler's Cinema Scene

Julianne Moore

“THE GLORIAS” My rating: B 

139 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Julie Taymor’s “The Glorias” isn’t your conventional biopic.  Often it seems to be less about Gloria Steinem the person than about the Women’s Movement as seen from Steinem’s perspective.

The results are hugely informative (and required viewing for all young women) but, for most of the film’s long running time, emotionally remote. Only in the  final inspiring moments (featuring footage of the real Steinem addressing the “Pink Pussy” women’s march on Washington early in the Trump presidency) does the enormity of Steinem’s contributions hit home.

Based on Steinem’s autobiography My Life on the Road,  the film is nevertheless classic Julie Taymor.  The story is told with a shuffled chronology with four actresses (Lulu Wilson, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Alicia Vikander and Julianne Moore) portraying Steihem at various stages of life.  Occasionally the older Gloria will share the screen with her younger selves in a series of interior dialogues.

There are animated sequences and lots of cinematic sleight of hand; the images shift from black-and-white to color (and sometimes just a splash of color in an otherwise b&w palette).

As is usually the case with Taymor, these inventions are arresting, sometimes shockingly dramatic, and provide sly commentary on the action.  Yet I can’t help but wonder if in the end they tend to push us away from her subject; “The Glorias” may be too busy for its own good.

But we do learn a lot about Steinem.  Like her childhood of near constant travel with a father (Timothy Hutton) who was a sort of benign con man (“If you don’t know what happens tomorrow, it could be wonderful”) and, later, her adolescence as caregiver to her emotionally fragile mother (Enid Graham).

There’s her lifelong love of tap dancing, presented here as a musical number unfolding in a black barber shop in the 1950s.

We see her post-college sabbatical in India, where young Gloria (now played by Vikander) is sensitized to the harsh lot of women.

Her writing career flourishes despite the myopic outlooks of her male editors. She becomes a household name for donning a Bunny suit to report on the lives of women working in the Playboy Club; thereafter she must endure being cast as the movement’s resident sex object. In fact, she fights for most of her life not to be viewed as the movement’s voice. Ironically, in the early days she was terrified of public speaking.

Alicia Vikander, Janelle Monae

But by far the most important influences in her life are the astounding women she meets and bonds with as the fledgling Women’s Movement takes shape.

You’ve got the flamboyant lawyer Flo Kennedy (Lorraine Toussaint), politician Bella Abzug (Bette Midler), black activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes (Janelle Monae), and Native American leader Wilma Mankiller (Kimberly Guerrero).

We witness the creation of Ms. magazine, the groundbreaking feminist publication, and endure the boneheaded backlash (newsman Harry Reasoner took a typically disapproving male view of the venture, then admitted that he screwed up only after Ms. became a financial success).

Steinem’s personal life (i.e. romantic) is barely alluded to. Early on she undergoes an abortion in Britain, but we learn nothing about the father. In the film’s final 20 minutes we see her dancing with a couple of men at her birthday party; she has a brief one-sided phone conversation with someone we assume is a lover, and very late in the film we see her Cherokee marriage ceremony to a British doctor.

But the men here have no agency.  (Given Hollywood’s long record of presenting female characters with no agency, this seems entirely fitting.)

Indeed, Taymor has described the film as a “Female Road Picture, one in which the female leads do not die in the end, and where the ‘narrative’ is not driven by romance or a bad marriage, or unrequited love or, for that matter, men. Gloria’s road story is about her ‘Meetings With Remarkable Women’. And that is a love story in itself.”

| Robert W. Butler