GET ON THE BUS (THE GLORIAS)

 

The biopic is one of the great high wire acts of cinema.

Get it right as a director and it can be box office gold, earning the adulation of audiences and critics.

Get it wrong and you will feel the full force of critical and audience derision.

Cinemagoers are especially sensitive about biopics because they play about with history.

Compressing the life of a well known public figure into two, maybe two and a half hours is no easy feat.

Narrative compromises have to be made and they inevitably risk getting viewers' backs up.

In 'The Glorias,' Julie Taymor takes on the life of the feminist icon, Gloria Steinem.

It's a mammoth task but her solution is to have four actresses playing Steinem at different junctures in her life.

However this is far from a conventional biopic - jumping between snapshots of four periods of her life and veering occasionally into tongue in cheek fantasy.

We see Gloria as a young girl, played by Ryan Keira Armstrong, watching her entrepreneur father, Timothy Hutton's Leo force his family out of their home and onto a life on the road as one venture fails after another.

While the young Gloria worships her bon vivant dreamer of a dad, her mother, Enid Graham's Ruth bears the brunt of all their financial woes.

We later discover she once had a promising career as a journalist but could not operate under her own name, instead writing using a male pseudonym.

By this time, Gloria has become Lulu Wilson's tap dance crazy teenager.

Leo is an absent father chasing get rich quick schemes across the US while Ruth struggles with a mental illness that makes her fearful.

As a young woman in her early twenties, Alicia Vikander's Gloria lands a scholarship that will take her to India which means she must turn her back on a potential marriage and also undergo an illegal abortion in London.

However the Smith College scholarship will prove seminal in helping her appreciate the universal struggle of women for equal treatment.

When she returns to the US to forge a career in journalism in the New York Times, Gloria encounters chauvinism and sexual harassment in the workplace from male colleagues of all ranks.

Not willing to suffer in silence, she creates a stir with an undercover expose of the treatment of Bunny Girls by Playboy in its nightclubs and also finds her voice through deeper involvement with the emerging feminist movement.

Working alongside Janelle Monae's Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Lorraine Toussaint's Florynce Kennedy, Bette Midler's Bella Abzug and Monica Sanchez's Dolores Huerta, Julianne Moore's older Steinem and her allies build a national movement that takes on the conservative, male dominated political and media establishment.

They set up their own magazine Ms to advance the cause, they campaign for abortion and stage a national convention to promote equal rights.

All of this will be familiar to audiences who watched FX's miniseries 'Mrs America' last year.

However Taymor and her fellow screenwriter Sarah Ruhl's approach to Steinem's life story is far from conventional.

As the film pinballs between episodes across the four Glorias' lives, she occasionally imagines them riding a bus together and engaging each other in conversation about her life.

The film shows how Steinem's good looks and sense of style were often used against her by patronising male media commentators and in one inspired sequence, a TV interviewer pursuing this sexist line of questioning becomes engulfed in a 'Wizard of Oz' style storm fused with an iconic image from 'The Handmaid's Tale'.

Working with Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who collaborated with her on 'Frida' the 2002 biopic of Frida Kahlo, Taymor conjures up some striking images in these fantasy sequences.

The vivid colours of 'The Wizard of Oz' pastiche contrast sharply with the black and white palettes and self-refelection of the bus sequences.

In a rich and daring biopic, the director makes some narrative choices that some viewers may quibble with.

For example, she glosses over Steinem's relationship with Christian Bale's environmental activist father David who died three years after their marriage in the year 2000.

But this is not necessarily a weakness.

Why should that relationship define a remarkable career? 

The film is also at its strongest in depicting the subtle ways chauvinism oppresses women in the workplace.

Gloria is given her break into journalism with assignments her male bosses believe will attract women readers such as fashion and interviews with the wife of a politician.

And yet, she is also expected to make the coffee and post mail and, in the most galling moment of the movie, she is told by her editor to meet him in a hotel suite.

During a taxi ride with colleagues, her career is dismissed as just another pretty young women briefly dipping into the world of journalism.

After she writes her Playboy exposé, middle aged colleagues quip that Gloria should go undercover in the porn industry.

Far from portraying Steinem as a feminist superhero, the movie is very effective in showing how she had to build her confidence up as a public speaker - literally finding her voice by pushing herself out of her comfort zone in a sequence that will resonate with many viewers.

Taymor elicits strong performances from Moore, Wilson, Armstrong and especially Vikander who physically transforms into the trademark Ray Ban wearing feminist icon.

It is also good to see Hutton back onscreen on top form.

He does a good line portraying a feckless father.

Graham, Monae, Midler, Toussaint, Sanchez and Kimberly Guerrero as the Native American feminist Wilma Mankiller are great value too.

At a running time of 139 minutes, 'The Glorias' sometimes feels like it could do with being pruned.

And while Sandy Powell's costumes along with Prieto's visuals ensure it is never dull, the regular narrative interruptions from the black and white bus and their insights into Gloria's state of mind begin to lose their charm as the film wears on.

Nevertheless Taymor once again shows she is more attuned to the visual and sonic storytelling possibilities of cinema than other directors who have made their name in theatre.

Ignore those critics who have dismissed 'The Glorias' as a mess of a movie.

It isn't.

Taymor's film is reverential but it is also bold, it's inventive even if it has flaws and it certainly isn't dull, even if it is too long.

As an entre into the life of Gloria Steinem, it may inspire some viewers to dive more into her history.

It may also encourage others to pick up the baton and advance the cause of women, building on Steinem's work.

As legacies go, that's a pretty damn good one to build.

('The Glorias' received its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2020 and was made available for streaming on Sky Cinema and Now TV in the UK and Ireland on March 7, 2021)

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