Movie Review: 'Grandma'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- In the comedy realm, Lily Tomlin has been a force of human nature ever since she surfaced on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In in 1970.
Her array of TV characters, including snooty telephone operator Ernestine and little-girl-on-her-big-rocker Edith Ann, were vivid and clever and telling and funny.
On the movie screen, she's done creditable work in dozens of films, including The Late Show, Nine to Five, All of Me, Big Business, I Heart Huckabees, A Prairie Home Companion, Admission, and Nashville, for which she received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress in 1975.
And now the force of nature gets to play a force of nature as Tomlin takes on the role of a career and nails it: septuagenarian Tomlin is a grandma in Grandma.
She plays Elle Reid, a curmudgeonly, once-celebrated gay poet who hasn't written anything in quite a while and whose romance with a younger colleague, played by Judy Greer, ends in the film's opening scene, in which Elle describes their current four-month relationship as a "footnote" to the nearly-forty-year relationship she had with her late lover, Violet, who died a year-and-a-half ago.
As Elle goes about dealing with her lingering grief, her pregnant and broke teenage granddaughter, Sage, played by Julia Garner, shows up in need of money – $600 -- to pay for the abortion she has scheduled at an outpatient clinic in eight hours.
Sage's boyfriend, played by Nat Wolff, has neither money nor motivation to help out, which Elle confronts him about.
So Grandmom and Granddaughter take their unshakeable, skipped-a-generation bond out on a road trip throughout Los Angeles, even though and never mind that when Ell mentions "The Feminine Mystique," Sage assumes it's "something out of X-Men."
As they reunite with friends and family members over a day, their act of desperation evolves into a meaningful journey, and they and their close relationships can't help but be affected.
Director Paul Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy, Little Fockers, Being Flynn, In Good Company, Admission), who wrote his own bittersweet and empathetic screenplay, keeps everything but the emotional impact on a modest scale, including the under-80-minute running time.
But he manages to include three generations in his tale, to populate the film with an array of impressively three-dimensional characters that provide his actors and actresses plenty to chew on, and to richly detail the emotional interconnectedness of this "family."
The revelation here might well be Sam Elliott, a prolific but perhaps underappreciated character actor who turns in a career-best performance as Elle's anguished ex.
And Marcia Gay Harden also registers sharply as Elle's angry and high-strung lawyer daughter and Sage's exasperated mother.
Weitz gets strong work from just about everyone in an ensemble in which Tomlin is the first among near-equals. But Tomlin as the regretful but resourceful, crotchety and cruel, sharp-tongued and combative, foolhardy and stubborn, but compassionate and cool protagonist – a self-described "horrible person" -- may be looking at her second Oscar nomination after a forty-year drought, this time in the Best Actress category.
So we'll come to the aid of 3 stars out of 4 for Grandma, a smart, witty, and moving comedy with a host of fully yet economically realized characters, and a lead performance by Lily Tomlin that adds yet another vivid and funny character to her one-woman repertory company.
