Review: The Glorias (Sundance 2020)

February 4th 2020, 11:21am

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

PLOT: The life of feminist icon Gloria Steinem, through her early days as a journalist through her role in the women’s rights movement in the 1960s and beyond.

REVIEW: Julie Taymor is an interesting director. For my money, she’s up there with Baz Luhrmann for having made one of the best Shakespeare movies ever (TITUS) while her Beatles musical, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, was a gonzo fantasia that worked better than it ever should have considering they didn’t have the rights to any of the original recordings. And that’s not even counting her stage work, with THE LION KING on Broadway earning raves even if “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark” well…didn’t.

THE GLORIAS is Taymor’s reverent ode to feminist icon Gloria Steinem, similar in some ways to perhaps her most well-received film, FRIDA. It’s a touch messy and unwieldy, with some questionable casting and oddball flights of fancy that would probably be better off being excised, but one can’t deny it’s a compelling look at one of the defining figures of the late 20th century and beyond.

In her Sundance intro, Taymor mentioned that the premiere would be the first time an audience has seen the film, and to an extent, it felt a bit unfinished, with dodgy VFX in a handful of weird fantasy sequences that, in their current form, beg to be cut out of the film. The pacing also seems off, with it taking forever for us to finally get to Julianne Moore’s amazing portrayal of Steinem from middle age and beyond – a performance that seems like a surefire Oscar contender.

Running a lengthy 139 minutes, it’s not hard to imagine a 120-minute version of the film playing like gang-busters, and what we saw certainly felt like a bit of a rough cut. Probably the biggest problem with the film, and one that won’t easily be solved in editing, is that Alicia Vikander, as good of an actress as she is, never really convinces as the younger Steinem. There’s very little continuity between her performance and Moore’s – you never get a sense that they’re playing the same person. Vikander seems a little too refined for the role. This isn’t a criticism of her acting – she’s perfectly good in the part but it never feels like she inhabits the part the same way Moore does. That leaves the first half of the film feeling ill-conceived to a certain extent. The stories we’re watching, such as Steinem going undercover as a bunny at the Playboy Club, are never as compelling as they should be as Vikander just doesn’t seem believable.

However, once Moore enters the picture, THE GLORIAS gets kicked up a couple of notches, with it documenting her work in the Women’s Rights movement in an intimate, interesting way. Moore seems born to play the part, although again – she’s so good the continuity between her and Vikander is jagged. There are so many good stories in this half of the film you can’t help but wish Moore has just played the part all the way through (she could easily pass for twenty years younger).

Taymor’s also assembled an interesting supporting cast, including a juicy role for Bette Midler as activist Bella Abzug, while Lorraine Toussaint steals scenes as Flo Kennedy. Timothy Hutton, who’s perennially under-appreciated, has a gem of a role as Steinem’s heartbreakingly unreliable but well-intentioned dad, a neer’ do well con man who teaches his daughter the tricks of the trade, inadvertently providing her with excellent training for some of her sneakier assignments as a journalist.

While highly uneven and too shaggy in its current stage to work as a major film, THE GLORIAS still has a lot of potential, and with a recut I think Taymor’s film could still be quite successful, even if the problem of casting two such wildly different actresses as the younger/older versions of the same role seems like a gamble that didn’t pay off. At the very least, it’s an informative, reverent biopic that gives some much-needed context to the early days of the feminist movement and celebrates a figure in Gloria Steinem who deserves it.