The Glorias (2020)
dir. Julie Taymor
Rated: R
image: ©2020 Roadside Attractions
The Julie Taymor who directed the electric films Titus, Frida, and, yes, even Across the Universe – a movie which wasn’t well received by most critics, but which really worked for me – shows up a little over an hour into her latest effort, The Glorias, the biopic about journalist and activist Gloria Steinem.
There are Taymor flourishes in the meandering first 70 minutes of the picture, to be sure. The film opens with a sequence in which an older version of Steinem – four actresses play the iconic feminist throughout The Glorias – looks out the window of a Greyhound bus as it rolls along the highway. Steinem and everything inside the bus are in black and white, everything outside the bus is in full color. It sets an interesting aesthetic that doesn’t pay off until Steinem finds her fiery passion for the Women’s Liberation movement. That’s when the movie really starts to rip.
Based upon My Life on the Road, Steinem’s 2015 autobiography, The Glorias shows us snippets of the activist’s life, broken up into roughly four segments. Ten-year-old actress Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays the adolescent Gloria, Lulu Wilson portrays the teenaged Gloria, Alicia Vikander is Gloria from ages 20 to 40, and the incomparable Julianne Moore plays the older Gloria. Taymore and her editor, Sabine Hoffman, jumble up the timeline, weaving scenes from each era of Steinem’s life together, occasionally getting all four versions of our hero together on that Greyhound bus so that she can reflect on the life she’s lived.
The effect is uneven. Once we get to Steinem kicking the patriarchy’s ass – which began when she wrote an undercover piece about the awful working conditions of the “bunny” cocktail waitresses at New York’s Playboy Club in the 1960s – the movie sabotages its own momentum by doubling back to one of the less interesting segments.
We see the influence her itinerant huckster father had on young Gloria. From him she learned how to make her own luck in life. Timothy Hutton is appropriately showy in the role of Leo Steinem, a man who is always on the move to make the next quick buck. Teenaged Gloria must look after her psychologically fragile mother. She learns the value of caring for others. We also see a post-college Gloria on a grant-funded trip to India, where she connected with women of the poor, lower castes and learned about their lives.
These episodes in Steinem’s early life show us how Gloria Steinem came to be the woman who, in the 1960s and 70s, helped spark Second-Wave Feminism. The problem is Taymor never successfully finds a way to make these obligatory biopic elements very compelling or engaging. They come across – both in the writing and staging – as inert.
That all changes in the key sequence of The Glorias. Steinem goes on a local New York TV talk show to discuss her work on the Playboy Club article and is subjected to abhorrent sexism. The male host asks if Steinem is aware of how sexually attractive men find her, and he all but reduces her to an object. The fantasy sequence that follows, a big, gloriously outlandish homage to The Wizard of Oz, with Gloria as the Wicked Witch raining down curses onto the clueless host, is pure Julie Taymor and brilliantly realized.
Taymor’s lavish set and production design recreate a living, breathing version of post-war America that is equally brimming with rage and excitement. There’s a raw energy to this portion of the movie. Taymor and her cast are able to conjure a sense of anything-is-possible and the belief that with enough hard work, the Women’s Liberation movement – in close solidarity (the movie adroitly goes out of its way to emphasize) with Black, Brown, and Indigenous Liberation movements – would change things for the better.
The Glorias is peppered with strong cameo performances from an outstanding supporting cast. Janelle Monáe is effortless as activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes; the magnetic Lorraine Toussaint plays the larger-than-life Florynce Kennedy; Bette Midler embodies the dynamic women’s rights activist Bella Abzug.
These women, along with Steinem, fought tirelessly for gender equality when it wasn’t popular. Oh wait, I nearly forgot, gender equality efforts are still met with bile and hate. One of the most dispiriting things about the movie was simultaneously realizing as I was watching it how little progress the movement has made, with abortion now poised (thanks to our Christian Supremist coddling president) to be illegal in America within the next few years.
One performance in the film stands out among the rest. The (seemingly) effortless ease with which veteran Julianne Moore slips into the role of the feminist icon is stunning. Moore replicates Steinem’s unique speaking pattern – the sound, cadence, and rhythm – and makes it sound natural. It’s so good that Alicia Vikander’s take on a younger Steinem suffers by comparison. The Swedish actress approximates Steinem’s distinctive voice, but (especially compared to Moore) her version sounds forced, like Vikander was trying a little too hard.
One of the subtextual themes running throughout The Glorias is that surrounding yourself with people who don’t look like you can transform one into a better, more empathetic, fuller human being. We see that in Gloria’s travels in India as a young woman, and later with her commitment to include Black, Brown, and Indigenous liberation movements within the feminist struggle.
Steinem learned these lessons in her formative years, and Taymor never quite figures out how to bring these moments to life on the screen. That’s made more evident when you juxtapose those bits of the timeline with the part of the movie that really cooks: Gloria Steinem and the other movement leaders affecting real change in their own lives, in the country, and even around the world. The Glorias is uneven, but it’s an inspiring tribute to a vital figure of late-20th century history, and – the film includes towards its end footage of the real Steinem addressing a crowd at the first Women’s March – early-21st century history, too.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- It’s over long (and I mostly feel that way) because it spends too much time on well-worn, standard biopic territory. But, when it cooks, it cooks. If you’re interested in the history of social movements and women’s rights, I highly recommend giving it a look.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- There’s a lovely little segment where young Gloria practices her tapdancing with another girl in her father’s barber shop. One little flourish of CGI trickery has the camera moving directly in front of mirrors without them catching sight of it. It’s an inspired 60 seconds or so.
- As much as audiences of today might need it, The Glorias falls into a cringeworthy bit of didacticism as an attendee of MLK’s March on Washington unleashes a torrent of exposition about why it’s a shame that no women are speaking at the event. I’m behind the message, just not the delivery.
- I have a feeling I might have been harsher on this movie if I had seen Todd Haynes’s experimental biopic about Bob Dylan, I’m Not There. That 2007 film also features several different actors playing the central character. But, I haven’t caught up with that one, so Taymor’s approach (mostly) worked for me.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Saw this on Amazon Prime. It’s not an Amazon produced film, but they have the exclusive streaming rights to it (aside from making an actual digital rental or purchase of it).