Grandma
Original post date: 22 February 2019
Rating: ✭✭✰✰
Lily Tomlin is always such a delight to encounter in a movie or TV role (her latest gigs include being the voice of Aunt May in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the Netflix series Grace and Frankie) that it is jarring to see her play a really unpleasant character as she does here. Although known mainly for comedy, we have always known that she has serious dramatic chops, and they get a good showcase here. Written and directed by Paul Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy), this flick more or less has the classic structure of the Heroic Quest. In the middle of a messy breakup with a younger lover, Tomlin’s feminist writer/poet Elle is approached by her teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner), who is going through her own crisis: she is pregnant and wants an abortion—today. The screenplay puts a somewhat arbitrary deadline on the procedure to heighten the dramatic tension as well as the somewhat arbitrary restriction of Elle being broke and having just cut up her credit cards. The film thus becomes an episodic journey in search of money where the pair visit various people—really visits to Elle’s past. While the termination procedure is the official MacGuffin, the real one is the goal of making us actually like Elle, who is extremely bitter and unpleasant, sometime before we get to the end. It just about succeeds—just. As is often the case with films featuring Sam Elliott, he is the best thing in it, playing the still-bitter man who married Elle before she realized she was a lesbian. Other welcome faces include John Cho and Nat Wolff (briefly) as well as Elizabeth Peña, Colleen Camp and Marcia Gay Harden as the third leg in the two main characters’ stool of family estrangement. While not exactly the feel-good lark many Tomlin fans might prefer, she does give a performance deserving of nothing but respect and certainly light years better than the 1978 disaster (co-starring John Travolta) Moment to Moment written and directed by Tomlin’s future wife Jane Wagner.
Rating: ✭✭✰✰
Lily Tomlin is always such a delight to encounter in a movie or TV role (her latest gigs include being the voice of Aunt May in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the Netflix series Grace and Frankie) that it is jarring to see her play a really unpleasant character as she does here. Although known mainly for comedy, we have always known that she has serious dramatic chops, and they get a good showcase here. Written and directed by Paul Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy), this flick more or less has the classic structure of the Heroic Quest. In the middle of a messy breakup with a younger lover, Tomlin’s feminist writer/poet Elle is approached by her teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner), who is going through her own crisis: she is pregnant and wants an abortion—today. The screenplay puts a somewhat arbitrary deadline on the procedure to heighten the dramatic tension as well as the somewhat arbitrary restriction of Elle being broke and having just cut up her credit cards. The film thus becomes an episodic journey in search of money where the pair visit various people—really visits to Elle’s past. While the termination procedure is the official MacGuffin, the real one is the goal of making us actually like Elle, who is extremely bitter and unpleasant, sometime before we get to the end. It just about succeeds—just. As is often the case with films featuring Sam Elliott, he is the best thing in it, playing the still-bitter man who married Elle before she realized she was a lesbian. Other welcome faces include John Cho and Nat Wolff (briefly) as well as Elizabeth Peña, Colleen Camp and Marcia Gay Harden as the third leg in the two main characters’ stool of family estrangement. While not exactly the feel-good lark many Tomlin fans might prefer, she does give a performance deserving of nothing but respect and certainly light years better than the 1978 disaster (co-starring John Travolta) Moment to Moment written and directed by Tomlin’s future wife Jane Wagner.
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