Sydney Film Festival Review: Grandma

Julia Garner and Lily Tomlin in Grandma

Lily Tomlin stars in this road trip movie that involves a short commute in comparison to the standard fare of this genre—a day trip around Los Angeles really, with a very specific destination, peppered with various pit-stops.  A teenager Sage (Julia Garner) pays her grandmother Elle (Tomlin) a surprise visit one morning with news that she is with child, scheduled an appointment for an abortion that evening, and needs cash to pay for the procedure.  While the agenda clearly centers around assisting the teenager’s request, Grandma is really about the free-thinking seventysomething matriarch whose life passes before her in just a few hours.  The slightly teary drama provides a few chuckles along the way as we get a small peak into the life of a writer who has grown more resolved in her need to be independent and isolated after the death of her long-term partner (who is often talked about like another character in the movie to sometimes cloying degrees like the audience is being reminded that lesbians can be good parents too).  

Paul Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy) wrote, produced, and directed the film which debuted at Sundance earlier this year and involves three generations of women, augmented by various other shades of femininity and age. Elle represents an era whose strength and unwillingness to compromise paved the way for female reproductive rights (which didn’t come at a small cost on several different levels).  Her daughter Judy (Marcia Gay Harden), in some respects, stands in for the next crop of women who assimilated themselves to the preexisting power structure and proved their equality through talent, achievement, and drive (traits that had been traditionally mis-ascribed to only males).  Sage is a blank slate that symbolizes a cross section of females who aren’t foreign to any era: young, lost, and vulnerable to the whims of passion.  Weitz is careful not to make any judgment on choices or personality type, even placing Elle’s politics in check a few minor times.  But, Sage herself is mostly a catalyst and plot device.  Sure, like a lot of teenagers, she’s naive and malleable, but here she primarily embodies a woman’s (or girl’s) right to choose what she does with her body.  A few years ago, Juno MacGuff made the more politically-correct choice.  Sage is making the opposite one that, while legal for the last forty years, is still treated in the mainstream like a dirty little secret.  Grandma is mostly without apology skewed to the liberal art-house crowd it courts, though not without some reflection.  Obviously, we’re not taken step-by-step through the process of what happens to a ten-week old fetus like something out of Lake of Fire, but there are a few acknowledgements that a decision like this isn’t without consequence or collateral damage (there's also a telling irony to which end of a punch she ends up on in two instances).  

Aside from a heartbreaking Sam Elliott and the late Elizabeth Peña, the latter of which mesmerizes the camera with her butch cafe owner, the cast is serviceable.  Harden goes for a more nuanced neurotic executive, while I imagine she could have still delivered a fully realized character while shooting for zanier highs (her character is alluded to often up to her third act reveal that one can kind of reasonably expect as much).  And while the one-dimensionality of the granddaughter weighs the screenplay down at times, the conceit provides a canvass for Tomlin to truly flaunt her feathers.  Her Elle is a salty curmudgeon who licks her wounds when no one is looking.  But, what makes her truly striking is the depth of Tomlin’s droll line delivery.  There’s a desperation and love for her granddaughter that drives each and every deadpan note.  Tomlin’s confidence in her comic abilities resonates with the purpose that has entered Elle’s life, and her unawareness that her granddaughter’s need for her has temporarily eradicated the strident selfishness which has engulfed the twilight of her life.  This film is truly a tribute to Tomlin and allows her to shine appropriately from start to finish, and a testament to all the various treasures Hollywood has lying around.  It’s only a matter of someone with enough influence and power to notice, pick one of them up, dust them off, and present them to the audience to say, “Hey everyone, remember her?  She used to be fantastic.  Guess what?  She still is.  And better than ever.”