female-driven

Movie Review: Gloria Bell

March 25, 2019 By Thelma 1 Comment

Props to Julianne Moore, 57, for producing an English-language remake of the uplifting 2013 Chilean film Gloria — which earned 19 international awards, a 99 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating and an AARP Movies for Grownups award nomination — helmed by the same talented director, Sebastian Lelio (whose transgender drama A Fantastic Woman grabbed the foreign-film Oscar last year). As the title character in Gloria Bell, stunning ginger beauty Moore dons big specs and strains to be an ordinary Orange County, Calif., divorced grandmother muddling through midlife. As if!

There is huge ambition here, reflecting the plight of Hollywood’s mature and most talented leading ladies as they search for material that will put them front and center, carrying the narrative arc they so richly deserve. Time and again — in the tragic early-Alzheimer’s drama Still Alice, for which she won the best actress Oscar in 2015, and the overlooked 2018 Bel Canto — Moore has sought roles that matched and amplified her unique talents: sharpness, grace, attention to detail, a bold desire to bare all and an iciness that would have made her, with a bottle of peroxide, an ideal Hitchcock heroine.

The hardest challenge for this extraordinary actress is playing ordinary and quotidian. Whether singing along to Olivia Newton John’s “A Little More Love” in her sensible sedan on the freeway or negotiating insurance claims in a nondescript modern office, Moore channels her inner awkwardness and vulnerability. At night, Gloria Bell tries to shed her self-consciousness and push away loneliness by going solo to a suburban disco, where she can surrender to the beats of her youth. At the bar she picks up Arnold (John Turturro, 62), an allegedly divorced ex-Marine. He can dance, and she likes where he leads, even if it’s only in circles under a disco ball. They tumble into bed for a series of encounters made all the more stiff by the actors’ lack of chemistry (they are old friends in real life, and that familiarity may have made the intimate scenes easier on the players, but for the viewer they’re hardly erotic).

The surrounding ensemble — led by Michael Cera as Gloria’s son; Brad Garrett, 58, as her larger-than-life ex-husband; Holland Taylor, 76, as her mother; and Jeanne Tripplehorn, 55, as her ex-husband’s wife — are top-notch. And it’s through Gloria’s interactions with these characters that the film addresses all-too-common problems for contemporary American women over 50 that go beyond dating and discos: the cloak of invisibility that can come after the kids are raised, the meaningful career long ago set aside, and the husband who has moved on to a younger wife and, perhaps, a new family.

In this carefully crafted character study, Moore sketches this woman who’s struggling to make a satisfying life with solo dinners, trying new things like zip-lining, and escaping to Las Vegas to capture true romance in the least authentic setting possible. The drama concludes with Laura Branigan’s 1980s anthem “Gloria,” as Moore’s divorcée finally dances to her own beat. While that moment is liberating, the strain of this extraordinary, luminous actress attempting to squeeze into a suburban shell pinches, leaving Moore still searching for her Hollywood groove.

[[This review first appeared on AARP]]

Berlinale Review: Director Mia Hansen-Love wins Silver Bear for ‘L’Avenir’ – Our Rave

February 21, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The Director Mia Hansen-Love wins a Silver Bear for her fifth film

When men hit midlife, they buy a red convertible, maybe a toupee and a gym membership – and often trade in the used wife for a new cookie. In contrast, the wives they cast off cry on public transportation. They contemplate and reject plastic surgery. When the public weeping stops, they may rejoice that that’s a legion of dirty socks they won’t have to bend over and pick up from the floor in the future. Ultimately, there’s a sense of liberation.

In L’avenir (Things to Come), Mia Hansen-Love’s realistic French-language drama making its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the Eden director follows the rhythms of Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert), a married Parisian high school philosophy professor and mother of two grown children. She should be enjoying the fruits of her labor, but then discovers that even when you have your own act very much together your life can still fall apart.

Huppert as Nathalie is about as much of a perfect woman—a feminist role model—as can be seen on screen. She is slim, and in that Parisian way, effortlessly chic. She passionately teaches philosophy—she’s big on Rousseau and the social contract—cooks game hen, arranges flowers, reads voraciously, tersely tends to her increasingly demented and childish mother, and enjoys the company of two children raised with love. As played by Huppert with confidence, control and minimal fuss, Nathalie is capable and brisk, enjoying life within the lines she has drawn over the past two plus decades.

And then Nathalie’s husband Heinz (Andre Marcon) announces he wants to leave, Nathalie’s publisher wants to sex up the covers of the philosophy texts she’s been writing for years, and her children become increasingly self-sufficient. It seems that the social contract she made with the world – that she would work hard and with integrity and be rewarded – has been broken. The movie echoes the 1978 Paul Mazursky film An Unmarried Woman with Jill Clayburgh, although infinitely more dry-eyed. Nathalie faces her future philosophically, navigating the unexpected upset as she would the countless crises of child-rearing or marriage – overcome the trauma, patch the problem and keep moving forward until it hurts just a little less, and then a little less. One day, the sun comes out and you can again feel its warmth on your cheeks, and get traction under your relatively sensible shoes (she is Parisian after all).

Writer-director Hansen-Love creates a lovely, mostly sharp character portrait of a capable woman facing a crisis in midlife with integrity. If Nathalie lacks the messiness and warmth of Clayburgh’s suddenly unmarried woman, that’s alright. Not everyone wears their life on their sleeve and the restraint here of Nathalie, and Hansen-Love, is admirable. The drama meanders in the third act, as Nathalie visits a protégé living on an anarchist farm and gets her puff of weed. But what makes it work is that, unlike Heinz, she doesn’t escape her rising sense of mortality by getting lost in the rumpled sheets with a man half her age. Sure, she looks over that cliff, and flirts with a neo-hippie commune – even hugging a donkey at one point – but the movie’s virtue is that, in the end, Nathalie returns to a life that she controls, crisply and philosophically. And, like Huppert herself, never makes one false move.

This review originally appeared on VanityFair.com

Director James Kent ‘Outs’ Vera Brittain’s Brother, Edward, at Manhattan Screening

June 7, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

That is a photo of a war hero. Buxton-born Edward Brittain was that dashing mustached man in uniform. But, even in the compelling and passionately pacifist period drama Testament of Youth, the real story of Edward’s (Taron Egerton) shooting has been subsumed in the female-driven drama of his older sister, Vera (Alicia Vikander). She after all, wrote the popular WWI memoir published in 1933. And when Vera Brittain wrote the book, she was likely unaware that of the real cause of her brother’s “heroic” death.

Edward Brittain took an Italian sniper’s bullet in the Somme five months before the Armistice, but the real betrayal stemmed from British Army homophobia. Shades of Alan Turing and The Imitation Game. Brittain’s commanding officers discovered a cache of Brittain’s letters that revealed sexual relations with ordinary soldiers n his unit at a time when homosexuality was illegal. According to Oxford-educated historian Mark Bostridge, Brittain was given an option: submit to court martial Army justice or place yourself in harm’s way and die “honorably.” It was the WW1 version of don’t ask, don’t tell, just go away.

The Three Musketeers: Vera’s brother Edward, Leighton, Victor Richardson — all WW1 casualties

While this even darker chapter in Vera’s story does not appear on screen, Director James Kent (who is gay himself) revealed the fascinating and deeply sad historical anecdote during a post-screening talk in Manhattan hosted by ZEALnyc.com in answer to the question: what did you have to leave out of the book to make the movie. Brittain later wrote about her brother in her 1936 novel Honorable Estate.

Taron Egerton in uniform as Vera’s brother Edward

Helen MIrren’s ‘Woman in Gold’ Glitters

May 16, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

All that glitters is Helen Mirren’s performance

Helen Mirren has become like Meryl Streep: nearly every time she has a leading role a little alarm goes off that signals “Oscar.” In this deeply emotional drama with a surprisingly light touch from Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn), Dame Helen plays Maria Altmann. Who? The Jewish Austrian refugee living in Los Angeles who seeks the restitution of her aunt’s portrait by Gustav Klimt, then the jewel in the crown of Austria’s Belvedere Museum, a property transfer curtesy of the Nazis. Because of Altmann, that painting now hangs in the Neue Galerie on East 86th Street for you to see every day except Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Its subject, Adele Bloch-Bauer has been liberated in perpetuity.

Altmann walked away from her wealthy, cultured parents – and their portrait of Aunt Adele – with nothing more than the clothes on her back and her husband, an opera singer, at her side. In this screenplay written by Alexi Kaye Campbell, the lushness of Altmann’s lost past, as gilded as her aunt’s portrait, contrasts with a present that unfolds with a thriller’s tension. When Altmann’s sister dies, Maria discovers letters that reveal a claim on the painting. She enlists the very green lawyer Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds, cast against type) to pursue her claim on the $100 million masterpiece. As it turns out, he has skin in the game, too: he is the grandson of the influential Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg.
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