Grandma – directed by Paul Weitz. Dramedy. 78 minutes Color 2015.
★★★★
The Story: a young woman and her grandmother scour the city to raise funds for the young woman’s abortion.
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One is down on one’s knees morning and evening that the part of the cranky grandmother was not cast with Shirley Maclaine. Instead as surprising absolution for our sins we are given the caustic highball of Lily Tomlin, for those who like their drinks best with bitters.
There she is aged 76 with her suspicious gorilla eyes and smile wider than generosity. This is why we go to the movies: simply to watch such people. To learn the answer, watch the posture she assumes as she tracks down Sam Neill.
The picture is a saga of Tomlin and her granddaughter traipsing from door to door of old lovers and acquaintances and debtors with hands held out. It’s a good story, satisfactorily told.
The difficulty is that the way it is directed eliminates the actual experience of the development of the relationship between the grandmother and her granddaughter to take place, for it relies on cross cuts – which is the method of focusing on one character as she speaks, and then focusing on the second character while that character speaks. What you get is a series of monologues, however brief, rather than the constant underlying potential of mutual energy actually moving between the two.
One problem may be that their dialogues are in cars, side by side. Another may be that the granddaughter is written, cast, and played uninterestingly. The result is that you feel nothing ever happens between them. The story rolls along without inner human development, although this shifts when late in the day the girl’s mother played by Marcia Gay Harden turns up to cauterize the scene.
It is also perhaps the fault of the writing in making Tomlin’s character alienating. She’s acerbic. She’s testy. She has her opinions and is outspoken with them. All of this presents a hard surface which does not allow penetration either in or out. As a feisty lesbian, we have a character hard to put up with.
But we also have it played out by Lily Tomlin, whose nature it is to express the tonic truth. This exists as a ground of being with Tomlin rather than a character choice. And we count on her for it. And she does not disappoint. The ruthless reversals of the expected are the response to life that fall from her. We wish nothing better for ourselves at all.