You’d may wonder why a man would choose to write and direct a movie like Grandma. It flies against everything we know about what sells in Hollywood, what kind of stories win awards – no central male figure who’s coming of age, coming of middle age or coming of old age? No broken hero who stands up for someone or saves humanity or suffers greatly for a cause? Just a grandmother helping her granddaughter get enough money for an abortion scheduled for that afternoon. Maybe it isn’t a big story in the lives of men but it is a drama played out every second of every day in a dramatically shifting America.
It kind of sneaks up on you. You are lulled in by Lily Tomlin’s brilliant lead performance that personifies the combination of traits that cause most conservatives to recoil in fear and outrage: feminist lesbian poet. She plays her role along the same lines as Jack Nicholson’s character in As Good as it Gets – a grouchy old woman who has no time nor patience for bullshit and often finds herself ejected from establishments for making a scene. Somehow Tomlin gets away with it without seeming shrill or even off-putting, which is a tribute to the magnificent woman she has become. It struck me how barren our film landscape has become for women like these, not just characters but human beings who have lived long lives and traveled down bumpy, jagged roads to emerge as a spectacular super novas with much to say, and, as the Talking Heads would say, a face with a view.
Tomlin plays Elle Reid whom we meet in the midst of a break-up with her younger girlfriend played by Judy Greer. The problem here is that Olivia needs to be loved and at this pint in her life Ella can’t go there. Her wife of 38 years has recently died and the loss weighs heavily, shutting down normal emotions. Adding to Elle’s turmoil, her young granddaughter Sage (the luminous Julia Garner)has shown up asking for money. Bad timing. In a fit of panic Elle has cut up all her credit cards and has only $48 cash on hand. Sage needs $630 to pay for an abortion. They try what used to be a “free” clinic for women but it has been turned into a coffee shop. Sage can’t wait another day as she’s already sick to her stomach. She’s in high school with a boyfriend who can’t even raise the money to help her.
As we follow Elle on her trek to scrape together as much money as she can from her few remaining friends, we watch her life unravel before our eyes. She’s never been a particularly easy person to know. And now that her partner has died, so much of her heart and soul seems to be lost. That partner mostly raised her own daughter, which she decided to have out of wedlock back in the 60s. The child is named Judy who becomes an equally unconventional woman played by Marcia Gay Harden. Judy in turn used a sperm donor to have Sage. And now Sage, the third generation is deciding to have an abortion.
The film is about a grandmother helping a granddaughter do something that’s not only personally difficult but long stigmatized by society until women’s right evolved. Rather than lecture her on her choice, Elle offers her granddaughter support, in keeping with the feminist ideals of her generation that were largely responsible for seeing pro-choice prevail in Roe V. Wade. That movement was hard fought, unbeknownst to so many young women today who disregard the word “feminism,” having bought into the nonsense coming from the right.
One of the nice things the film does is build a bridge between the original meaning of feminism and the new ways millennials seek to define and hopefully build upon it.; they’ve grown up in a post-feminist world thus, they really do have the luxury of discarding the “label.” To see high school girls who are unaware of Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir is to realize how little importance women’s issues have been given in the overall education of America’s youth. But hey, that’s what grandmas are for, especially grandmas who were firebrands in the 70s.
That’s not to say that Grandma is bogged down in any feminist screed, because it assuredly is not. It really is an entertaining family dramedy before it is a talky preachy lefty abortion movie. It’s funny, full of warmth and wickedness. It draws absorbing portraits of three uniquely interesting women who come from different perspectives and are just trying to make their way in the world.
Weitz for some inexplicable but admirable reason decided to tell a story that could have easily been relegated to cable or some other VOD platform. And yet, here it is. A feature film about women — lesbians, single unwed mothers. Trangender women. They’re talking about abortion, feminism, love, loss, regrets. Wait, someone actually thought women were important enough to write about?
It is a secret story passed on from friend to friend, generation to generation. A friend almost died trying to give herself an abortion after having four kids. Conservatives will tell you adoption is better, and yes, adoption can be wonderful. But it’s only wonderful for the lucky ones. How many hundreds of thousands of kids are awaiting families in foster care now? The world is overpopulated as it is — the last thing our planet needs is more people on it. Especially unplanned people whose prospects for being looked after properly often range from iffy to grim. We all have to say that you must rely on birth control and you must if you don’t want to get pregnant, but shit happens.
The times have changed where abortion is concerned. We have forces in our government actively working to undue Roe V. Wade that makes abortion legal in the United States, deep pocketed forces who are funding candidates who are running for President. This is uniformly true among all GOP contenders who know they can use this issue to fire up their right-wing evangelical base. If the Democrats continue to split and divide themselves they will not be a united force to take down the GOP, who will be within spitting distance of having a conservative president + a conservative Congress + and the power to destroy the fragile balance of the Supreme Court — a perfect storm that could wreak calamity for decades. All they have to do is beat the Democrats. To do that, they have to help knock out Hillary Clinton. Many starry-eyed progressives on the far left are doing much of the GOP’s work for them. It’s a painful thing to watch.
All three principle actresses in Grandma deliver awards-worthy performances, with Tomlin headed for lead actress consideration at the Oscars. The real discovery is the toe-headed curly top Julia Garner whose skin is the color of milk and proves she can hold her own opposite two powerhouses like Tomlin and Marcia Gay Harden. She has a bright career ahead of her.
It’s hard to say what critics will make of Grandma and to tell you the truth I’m dreading that part of it. Somehow, someway, films about women get tossed out of the race, either because they don’t make enough money or the critics don’t approve. Either way, Paul Weitz has done Hollywood and humanity a favor in making a film about not just women but older women. Lily Tomlin has never revealed so much of herself in any one performance: vitality, sexuality, vulnerability and true grit.
