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.
Butler's Cinema Scene 