Grandma
Paul Weitz (2015)
The action in Grandma occurs in the course of a single day but the writer-director Paul Weitz means to capture within that day the life of his elderly title character, Elle Reid. The timeframe and intention call to mind Wild Strawberries. Elle, like the protagonist of Bergman’s film, spends a fair amount of screen time in her car. As road movies, Wild Strawberries and Grandma are also both necessarily limited in their geographical scope. Bergman’s Professor Borg is en route from Stockholm to Lund, to collect an honorary degree at a ceremony there later in the day. In Grandma, which is set in Los Angeles, Elle Reid (Lily Tomlin) and her eighteen-year-old granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) are on a quest for the $630 needed to pay for the abortion that Sage is due to have in the early evening. There’s a further resonance between the two pictures. During his journey to Lund, Borg gives a lift to a middle-aged couple, whose car, after a near-collision with his, is a write-off. Man and wife, these two people row and trade insults continuously; they hate each other yet seem inseparable. After bad-tempered and unproductive encounters with other potential sources of funds, Elle and Sage decide they’ve no option but to try and get the abortion money from Judy, who is Elle’s daughter and Sage’s mother, and doesn’t get on well with either of them. It was when Judy (Marcia Gay Harden) entered the picture and she, Elle and Sage were sniping at each other that the horrifying Bergman pair got into my head, and wouldn’t leave. A difference between Wild Strawberries and Grandma, however, is that I don’t think I was meant to find the three generations of Elle’s family desolating.
She doesn’t have Isak Borg’s academic credentials but Elle Reid has been a university teacher, though it’s as a feminist poet that she’s made her name. In her youth she lived with (was married to?) a man called Karl, the father of Judy, but Elle left him to set up home, and raise her daughter, with a woman called Violet. Their thirty-eight year partnership ended with Violet’s recent death. Elle has subsequently been in a relationship with the much younger Olivia. Elle ends this relationship at the start of the day on which Grandma takes place. Shortly after Olivia (Judy Greer) has left the house, Sage arrives on the doorstep to seek her grandmother’s help with the abortion. Sage has no money. Elle – zany non-conformist that she is – decided to cut up her credit cards to create a mobile that now hangs in her home. (I didn’t get why she couldn’t withdraw cash from a bank but let that pass.) So the car journey begins. Cam (Nat Wolff), who got Sage pregnant, is the first port of call: under duress, he coughs up what he can but it’s nowhere near sufficient. The next visit is to Karl (Sam Elliott), whom Elle hasn’t seen for years. She tells him she can’t pay her rent and he agrees to help out, in exchange for a for-old-times kiss. At the last minute, Karl discovers what the money is really for and the reunion ends abruptly. Elle and Sage get to see Judy at work – she’s doing treadmill exercise in her office when they arrive – and reluctantly ask her to foot the bill. Judy complains that she supplied Sage with contraceptives but agrees to pay. This brief cessation of hostilities comes as both an anti-climax and a relief.
Grandma, although it’s very short (79 minutes), is divided into six sections. Each chapter heading appears on the screen in twee lower case. Endings. Ink. Kids. I’ve forgotten the next two. The last one is Dragonflies – the name of Elle’s best-known poem (she also has a dragonfly tattoo on her shoulder). In contrast to these laconic titles, the opening scene is overwritten. Elle dismisses Olivia by telling her, ‘You’re a footnote’. It’s an incisively cruel remark; Judy Greer and Lily Tomlin convey Olivia’s hurt and Elle’s immediate regret that she’s let her sharp tongue inflict the hurt; if the conversation ended there, the effect might be powerful. But, after a pause, Olivia splutters, ‘A footnote? That’s a horrible thing to say’, and Elle replies, ‘Well, I’m a horrible person’. Some of the later exchanges are what you expect in a movie with the wry, frazzled tone that prevails in Grandma: ‘Don’t yell’, says Sage to Elle. ‘I’m not yelling!’ Elle yells back. In an almost matching to-and-fro, Elle asks Sage why she’s crying: ‘I’m not crying’, insists her granddaughter with a big sob. Paul Weitz can write snappy one-liners but he hands them out according to how highly we’re meant to rate the characters’ respective lifestyles. Needless to say, Elle gets most of the best caustic lines but it’s noticeable too that, when Sage eventually has the abortion procedure, she is able – though pale and weakened by the treatment – to have the last, smart word at the expense of her mother. (How did the determinedly conventional Judy – a super-tense workaholic whose business clothes look as comfortable as a suit of armour – come to call her child Sage?)
The film has received overwhelmingly positive notices – currently 92% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, from 127 reviews. I don’t think much of it. Grandma, like Tangerine (although Sean Baker’s film is the more interesting), is firmly on the side of leading characters whose way of life is unconventional. While this partiality confirms the film-maker’s right-on credentials, his movie eventually depends on conventional formulae and on manipulating a liberal-minded audience. The approach also involves a degree of condescension towards the supposedly admirable protagonist. At an early stage of their journey, Elle and Sage go to a coffee shop, where Elle loudly reviles the coffee, then the manager who asks her to remember there are other customers. There are just the two – a drab middle-aged couple: when they start looking embarrassed, Elle has a go at them too. She pours coffee over the floor of the shop before taking her leave. During the visit to (the admittedly unappealing) Cam, Elle hits him in the genitals with a hockey stick. The audience I watched Grandma with at Curzon Soho roared with laughter at the heroine’s outrageous behaviour in these scenes – safe in the knowledge that Elle is (a) liberal in her politics and lifestyle and (b) elderly. Elle also reminisces about, and occasionally talks to, Violet. This would likely (and rightly) have been dismissed by many critics as formulaic sentimentality if Elle’s late lamented partner had been a man. Lily Tomlin, witty as ever, expresses the layers of regret in Elle’s personality; several reviewers have commented too on points of connection between Elle’s life and Tomlin’s own. But Tomlin’s skill and empathy, although they obscure the limitations of Paul Weitz’s script, can’t transcend them. Stephanie Zacharek praises Grandma as ‘a character study that’s not so much about aging, specifically, as it is about the great and awful process of getting to know yourself’. This seemed to me a process that Elle Reid had completed before the film got underway. Professor Borg learned a good deal more on the way to the degree ceremony.
15 December 2015