Review

Grandma

Elle (Lily Tomlin, left) takes a journey through her past in Paul Weitz’s bittersweet indie comedy Grandma.
Elle (Lily Tomlin, left) takes a journey through her past in Paul Weitz’s bittersweet indie comedy Grandma.

I've been trying to pin down exactly what it is that bothers me about Paul Weitz's Grandma, a human-scale movie that brushes up a lot of poignant stuff and features a winning performance from Lily Tomlin, a performer who probably hasn't had a role worthy of her talent since Robert Altman made her the emotional anchor of Nashville 40 years ago. (Let's take a moment to lament that her work in Linda Bloodworth-Thomason's stillborn HBO series 12 Miles of Bad Road will probably never receive public airing.)

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Karl (Sam Elliott) still carries a flame for the title character in Paul Weitz’s Grandma.

I think what concerns me might not concern most people, who understand that what they're watching is only a movie and will accept certain unlikely plot points as a premise. But there are five or six moments in this otherwise enjoyable movie where I simply couldn't buy what was going on onscreen. Parts of Grandma feel like an unnecessarily complicated student film, where the characters do everything but confront their obstacles in a logical and straightforward fashion.

Grandma

85 Cast: Lily Tomlin, Julia Garner, Marcia Gay Harden, Judy Greer, Laverne Cox, Nat Wolff, Elizabeth Pena, Sam Elliott

Director: Paul Weitz

Rating: R, for language and some drug use

Running time: 79 minutes

Leaving that aside -- and it's a lot for me to leave aside -- there are some moments in Grandma that compensate for the lazy script, most notably a devastating second-act appearance by Sam Elliott that, in less capable hands, could have come across as maudlin. Elliott, like Tomlin, is a consistently welcome presence; any movie that arranges for the two of them to share a scene has earned its right to our attention.

The film begins with a breakup -- Elle (Tomlin) is calling it off with her younger lover Olivia (Judy Greer) in what seems to be a needlessly brutal fashion. We quickly learn septuagenarian Elle is an "unemployed academic" and poet who was semi-famous decades before. She's snappish and cruel and seems to have alienated most everyone in her life, and we suspect she developed this crustiness as a defense mechanism after her longtime partner Violet died a few years before. She's the sort of feminist lesbian intellectual some people imagine indigenous to California. She's a stereotype, the hippie grandma prone to saying outrageous, politically incorrect things.

When her teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner from The Americans) shows up on her doorstep at 9 a.m., we can figure it's not just a social call. Sage needs something -- in this case, it's $600 for an abortion. She has an appointment scheduled for the end of the day.

All right, it makes sense that Sage might seek out her grandmother in this situation, but what's hard to believe is that neither of them has a reasonable way to access $600 (which they need to raise before 5:45 p.m.). Elle has just cut up (and presumably canceled) her credit cards, having finally dug herself out of debt. Trouble is, she has no cash on hand and no prospects until a check for a writer-in-residence gig arrives in a week or so. And Sage is broke because, hey, she's a teenager with a problematic relationship with her high-achieving attorney mother Judy (Marcia Gay Harden), who is also estranged from Elle.

OK, I understand $600 is a lot of money. But these characters aren't poor; they take a certain level of bourgeois comfort for granted. To give them a break, they seem to inhabit the social class professor Paul Fussell once identified as Category X -- self-styled nonconformists and bohemians who affect not to care for money. But c'mon. No bank accounts? It seemed to me the simplest solution to the cash flow problem would have been to pawn the predictably gorgeous vintage 1955 Dodge Royal (which happens to be Tomlin's real-life car) in which they set out on their quest to find the money by sundown. (I know! I'll sell the first editions!)

The first stop is Sage's baby daddy, a snotty would-be gangsta (Nat Wolff), whom Elle summarily deals with. Then they embark on a journey through Elle's past that includes encounters with solid performers like John Cho, Elizabeth Pena, Orange Is The New Black's Laverne Cox and, as an old flame from Elle's life before Violet, and Elliott. By the time the shrill Judy arrives on the scene, we think we know where this little dramedy is headed.

In the end, Grandma feels too formulaic and pat, though it's not completely predictable. It means to be a feminist movie, a movie about women taking ownership of their bodies and the sometimes wobbly trajectories of their lives, but it can't quite escape the conventions of the sitcom. (This is a problem it shares with Grace and Frankie, the Netflix series Tomlin stars in with Jane Fonda.) It's a lot more conventional than it pretends.

MovieStyle on 09/18/2015

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