Audio By Carbonatix
Young people are the only ones who ever talk about growing old gracefully. For those actually in the thick of it, the romance of that notion burns off pretty quickly, and wrinkles and creaky joints are the least of it: Growing old, gracefully or otherwise, means becoming the person you were always meant to be, only more so. After days, months and years of gradual transformation, you wake up one day to find that you’re 1,000 percent you. Your good qualities have entwined so fixedly with the bad that it’s hard to distinguish which are which. By the time you feel wholly comfortable in your own skin, everyone around you may find you unbearable.
Lily Tomlin’s performance in writer-director Paul Weitz’s Grandma doesn’t just hint at that idea; it lives in it. The movie gets off to a shaky start, working too hard to establish the unrepentant prickliness of Tomlin’s character, a widowed poet named Elle. But it gradually settles and deepens into something nuanced and moving, a character study that’s not so much about aging, specifically, as it is about the great and awful process of getting to know yourself.
Grandma opens with a breakup, a rather vicious one: The seventy-ish Elle is calling it quits with a younger woman who we quickly ascertain is her girlfriend. It’s the sort of breakup where, believing you know where a relationship is headed, you drive the knife in further and deeper than you need to, preemptively wounding your partner more than he or she could ever hurt you. The girlfriend, Olivia (Judy Greer), stands dumbstruck. As Elle’s tirade escalates, we learn that the two have been seeing each other for only four months, but that Elle has always known the age difference would eventually become a problem. We learn that although she’s been writing poetry lately, she’s been lazy about getting it published.
This is just the beginning of the tart, subterranean grandeur that Tomlin, who has always been a marvelous actress but who hasn’t had a leading role in nearly thirty years, brings to Grandma. She fills out the role like a tree spreading its branches and roots, though she brings a superb lightness to it, too: Elle’s acidity often has a comic kick; for her, wisecracks aren’t just a defense mechanism, but a means of surviving the worst.
And she needs those wisecracks, perhaps now more than ever: Her granddaughter, Sage (Julia Garner), shows up on her doorstep, announcing that she’s pregnant and needs $600 for an abortion. Sage is so ethereal-looking you almost can’t quite believe she could conceive a human child; with her halo of pale-blond curls, she’s like an Arthur Rackham fairy. But she’s all too human, and Elle, after briefly berating her for her carelessness, agrees to help, even though she’s low on funds herself. The two pile into Elle’s car, a bumptiously elegant 1955 Dodge Royal, in search of the money.
During this road trip, the thorny map of family resentments is laid out. Sage doesn’t dare tell her distracted businesswoman mother, Judy (played with both sharpness and subtlety by Marcia Gay Harden), about the pregnancy. Elle isn’t speaking to Judy, either — the two have had a falling-out. What’s more, all three women are still in mourning for Violet, Elle’s longtime partner, Judy’s mom, and Sage’s other grandmother: She died not so long ago, after suffering through an illness. Grandma is a multigenerational story in which men are side players, though they’re not completely negligible. In one of the movie’s finest and most piercing scenes, Elle and Sage seek out one of Elle’s old friends, who, it turns out, was at one time something more. Karl (Sam Elliott) is happy enough to see Elle, but he’s puzzled, too. What follows is part tender reconciliation, part brutal showdown. It’s also a point of reckoning for Elle, who has a seemingly endless ability to inflict damage on other people. Elle seems not to care that she has caused pain, and yet she betrays, in the smallest of ways, that she does. She’s a woman who is 1,000 percent herself and could perhaps use a little dilution.
