EQUAL RIGHTS ICON PORTRAYED IN STAGES

DIRECTOR USES TOOLS FROM MOVIE MAGIC BOX

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The evolution of gender equality is represented by the many different faces involved in the equal rights movement that achieved what parity between the sexes does exist.

Director Julie Taymor creates a visually appealing and intellectually stimulating adaptation of Gloria Steinem’s autobiography, My Life on the Road.

The Glorias (2020) depicts Steinem’s long road to equality with the use of a bus travelling down the highway as a narrative device.

Taymor relies on four distinct narratives for each stage of Steinem’s life

Julianne Moore portrays Steinem in her later years, while Alicia Vikander portrays Steinem as a young woman learning and developing her ideas about gender equality as a journalist. Lulu Wilson plays a young Gloria, and Ryan Kiera plays Gloria as a child.

The four distinct performances each have their own narrative, but begin to meet on the bus, and even talk to each other during transition scenes as the four narratives intertwine.

Timothy Hutton has a great performance in all four narratives as Gloria’s father, Leo.

Leo is portrayed as a bit of a huckster, but an endearing father who dearly loved his children throughout their lives.

Taymor creates many artful scenes in different forms of media, including the reflections of motorcycles riding off down the highway shown in Gloria’s trademark glasses as she stares out the window of a roadside diner before the title credit appears at the beginning of the biopic film.

News reels are used to highlight the biographical nature of the material being filmed, including the March on Washington as the dramatized scenes of Gloria joining the march are transitioned into the film narrative.

Taymor also switches from tight camera shots on inanimate objects to full set shots of the characters discussing important life issues.

The dialogue is often didactic about the importance of the cause without being overbearing. Taymor incrementally brings in the gender equality issues, after the audience has already bonded with Gloria and her father, Leo. The script then mirrors the tenuous oscillation of the advancing subject matter throughout America, and then the larger global movement as well.

Leo and his family become a bit flustered with a summer rainstorm in the farming belt through the America Midwest in Taledo, Ohio. Leo has a dance in the rain anyway, and then while explaining that his family must go on the road, and then come back next year and try again, the rain seeps through the attic and drops on his face, stopping him in mid-sentence.

Hutton’s performance is a good constant throughout the movie, but he clearly only has a supporting role to the lead character, shared by the four Glorias.

Vikander portrays Gloria as a young woman gradually discovering on her own just how difficult systemic gender barriers are for women. Gloria is never naïve, but she initially tries to compete in the male dominated print media industry before finding her own ground and founding Ms. Magazine as part of the equal rights movement.

Vikander always has an endearing on screen persona from film to film which suits her role as a young Gloria Steinem.

As well, Taymor’s use of all four Glorias increases the audience’s ability to connect with the biopic character and the intellectual subject matter behind the film until the whole idea resonates by the end credits.

The scenes transition nicely despite the time element, while the use of four narratives for four different life stages allows for smooth intertwining into one main narrative.

During one transition, Vikander is eating a Fudge Sundae in a diner after quitting her magazine job. Then the camera goes to Hutton plopping a scoop of ice cream onto the dinner plate of a much younger Gloria.

Taymor subtly shows the audience with these outtakes and the four narratives that the iconic figure was influenced by her family, especially the loving and doting father.

The film is well thought through with an overall vision, such as Lulu Wilson showing how the young Gloria bonded with Black American women while tap dancing in a ‘Blacks Only’ barber shop.

Taymor then unites Vikander with Janelle Monae as Dorothy Pitman Hughes. The joining of white women and Black women for the same gender equality cause is not so surprising anymore as the narrative moves from chance meetings to public speaking and then large women conferences.

Scenes also bleed together when the plot reverses, such as Gloria returning to America from studying and travelling in India.

Taymor also experiments, including a scene with the bus travelling down the highway as the landscapes change sequentially to depict the passage of time.

Taymor leaves little room for criticism, although the movie is not flawless. Some scenes could use the same creativity used in many other scenes, perhaps changing camera and panning around the room more might be all that is needed.

A film score is used, but sparingly. And the film might be too complicated for some audiences, and a bit too didactic for other people.

The Glorias is a very good film though, entertaining, at times witty and generally highly recommended.

The Glorias is streaming on Amazon Prime.

CINERAMA

VIKANDER PERFORMS THE MORAL WRINKLE IN A SEQUENCE OF FILMS

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 6, 2018

One actress reinvented the female role model through different genres until culminating in a retake of the female action adventure hero.

Alicia Vikander plays rational soft hearted historical characters in period dramas, including an Oscar winning performance in a supporting role for her portrayal of painter Gerda Wegener in the Danish Girl (2015).

Vikander plays the wife of landscape painter, Lili Elbe, played by Eddie Redmayne. Elbe’s gender confusion leads to one of the first experimental transgender surgeries.

Vikander shows how Wegener is initially upset about the discovery, but she later supports her husband in the life changing decisions.

Vikander plays similar heart felt roles in the period drama, Testament of Youth (2015), about friends and family diverted from a beautiful life by the violence of World War I.

Vikander’s character challenges her father’s refusal to allow her to attend university, but then she later gives up university to contribute to the war effort as a nurse to the wounded.

Dominic West plays the family patriarch.

Vikander’s characters gradually make more and more flawed choices in subsequent film projects as she plays the wife of a lighthouse keeper on a remote island off the coast of Australia in The Light Between Oceans (2016).

Michael Fassbender plays the lighthouse keeper who discovers a baby in a boat adrift in the ocean near the lighthouse.

The couple, having had two miscarriages, convince themselves to take the baby as their own. The decision leads to short term happiness, but the life choice eventually destroys the family’s happy story.

The costume dramas are finally put aside as Vikander takes on the role of artificial intelligence in Ex Machina (2015). Vikander plays a robot designed to think and feel and even have sex with the machine’s creator.

Vikander also has a small part in the biopic about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, The Fifth Estate (2015).

Vikander shows audiences of her films that all the good intentions are hindered by the innately flawed human character.

This portrayal of human nature culminates in the starring role in the action adventure franchise reboot, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2018). Croft is the loving daughter of an oligarch whose missing father haunts her throughout the franchise history.

Dominic West again plays the family patriarch opposite Vikander.

The $94 million reboot of the franchise has Vikander playing a slightly less perfect heroine than played by Angelina Jolie in the two other franchise films, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003).

Jolie is near game perfect, and highly skilled in all the tools necessary for a successful adventure against criminal organizations.

Tomb Raider was initially created as a video game.

Vikander reprises the role as a smaller, more boyish figure, vulnerable, not invincible, but more realistic.

Vikander goes through a physical transformation for the role by adding about 12 pounds of muscle onto a petite frame during four months of training in mixed martial arts and rock climbing. 

Dominic West and Vikander create an on-screen intertextual moment with their roles in Testament of Youth when Lord Richard Croft asks Lara Croft how she did at university. Vikander is a bit befuddled by the question, but then she honestly answers that she chose not to go to university.

This scene highlights a feature film career begun just eight years ago with the Swedish actress continuing to show a beautiful, kind hearted soul hindered by a bit of an immoral wrinkle ever present in the human condition.