OF GIRL POWER
(Gayle Rankin), a young woman who spends her days clad in fur and wearing wolf make-up. Britney Young is especially good as Carmen, a shy woman who turns out to be wrestling royalty – her father is a pro-wrestling star who has forbidden her to join the sport.
Sam has ideas about creating a convoluted epic about a planet of lesbians, but his investor, a trustfund kid named Sebastian “Bash” Howard (Chris Lowell), insists that Glow will only be successful if it is consistent with male wrestling’s blunt adherence to conflicts between good and evil and the trash talk that transpires between them. It eventually dawns on the women that these characters have the potential to be dangerously offensive, yet Ruth nevertheless pines and pesters Sam to issue her a role, no matter how sexist or degrading. She’s all in.
Brie and Gilpin do terrific work in their roles both in and out of the ring, conveying the outrage and guilt of one woman betraying another.
Glow is consistently committed to a brisk pace and lightness. In a way, it’s reminiscent of Penny Marshall’s memorable 1992 film, A League of Their Own, about the brief glories of a women’s baseball league during World War II. Both are period pieces that capture the prevalence of sexism at different points in American history.
Even though Glow is a looser and grittier undertaking, it follows the same basic template, whereby a coach bosses women around without really knowing what the end result will look like and ends up confronting his own misgivings and insecurities about gender.
Tom Hanks’s famous admonition from that movie – “There’s no crying in baseball!” – morphs into Glow’s notion that, while an arena full of sceptical men are watching, you bring your tears, anger, resentment and anything else you’ve got into that ring with you.
It all proves useful. – The Washington Post