Movie review: Grandma is delightfully cranky

Lily Tomlin plays a cantankerous older woman who must find $630 to pay for her granddaughter to get an abortion in this slight but memorable drama

Grandma

Starring: Lily Tomlin, Julia Garner, Judy Greer

Directed by: Paul Weitz

Rating: 3½ stars out of 5

Running time: 79 minutes

By Jay Stone

 

Lily Tomlin made her reputation as a brilliant comedian who created indelible characters (like Ernestine, the telephone operator) on TV. But she revealed another side in 2004, when she co-starred in the film I (Heart) Huckabees: a video of her berating the director David O. Russell — a man who is no stranger to angry actors — went viral, and the world watched Tomlin go magnificently off the handle.

 

It’s not much of a stretch from that to Elle, the magnificently off-the-handle heroine of Grandma, a brief and pungent character study of a cranky and outspoken woman who spends a day driving around greater Los Angeles trying to arrange an abortion for her granddaughter.

 

Elle is a great role — Oscar-worthy even, if Grandma itself wasn’t such a brief, one-track film — and Tomlin, who’s 76, settles into it with all the glee of a cantankerous senior citizen kicking up a fuss at the local coffee shop because the manager has asked her to keep down the noise. In fact, that is one of the scenes in Grandma, which is laced together with a series of such scenes, like a string of sour pearls.

 

Elle is a once-famous poet who, it appears, has been unhappy since the death of her longtime partner. She is just breaking up with her latest girlfriend, young and beautiful Olivia (Judy Greer), whose attraction to this unhappy crackpot we must mostly take on faith. Just then, her teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) arrives with the news that she needs $630 for an abortion, a modest-sounding sum that nonetheless might as well be a million dollars to these people. For one thing, Elle has just shredded all her credit cards and hung the pieces on a wind chime as a statement of her acerbic independence.

 

The rest of Grandma sees Elle and Sage driving around town in Elle’s 1955 Dodge Royal — Tomlin’s actual car and a vehicle that somehow seems to be as ill-tempered as its owner — trying to call in debts from old friends and lovers. These include Sage’s hapless boyfriend (Nat Wolff), who is left moaning on the floor and $50 poorer after Elle’s visit, and Deathy (Laverne Cox), a transsexual who works in a tattoo parlor and can’t offer much except a free tattoo.

 

None of these scenes is connected, except in the loose way of an abbreviated road movie. Most of the meat of Elle’s inferred past comes when she visits Karl, an old boyfriend whom she dumped as she was emerging as a lesbian. Karl is played by Sam Elliott, whose career as a go-to cowboy has now morphed into one as the go-to love interest for older women (he was also the hottie in See You In My Dreams). At the age of 70, Elliott is still hunky, but here he puts an edge on his ruggedness that turns his scenes with Tomlin into a brilliant little study of a failed 1960s romance: this is what it was like before we knew who we were.

 

Lurking at the edges of Grandma is everyone’s fallback: Sage’s fearsome mother, who has lots of money but who is the last person you want to borrow it from, especially for a high school abortion. She’s played by Marcia Gay Harden with an acid tinge that lets you see the family resemblance.

 

Written and directed by Paul Weitz (About A Boy), Grandma revels in its brief running time — under an hour and a quarter — and the way in which it casually rubs against several hot-button American issues (teenage abortion, lesbianism, not having a credit card) as it chugs by in its antique auto. This is a sketch, but it’s a memorable one, and you sense that it’s at the beginning of something: geezer cinema, a look at the baby boomers today after they’ve succeeded, or failed, or come out, or stayed in.

 

“I like being old,” Elle says. “Young people are stupid.” That’s it: never trust anyone under 60.

 

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Review: Grandma is delightfully cranky

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3.5Score

Grandma: Lily Tomlin is a delight to watch as cantankerous old Elle Reid, an angry woman who must pull herself together to help her teenage granddaughter, who has just announced that she needs an abortion. This is a slight film that strings together a series of small incidents, but Tomlin, and her co-stars, make it a memorable one. 3 1/2 stars out of 5 _ Jay Stone

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