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.