Oscar buzz for tart-tongued Lily Tomlin
In Grandma, a film now showing countrywide, actress Lily Tomlin’s character bears a striking resemblance to Lily Tomlin.
IT ISN’T just that actress Lily Tomlin wears her own clothes in the film Grandma, which charts the course of a single day, as Tomlin’s Elle (pronounced like the “L” in Lily) tries to ensure her pregnant 18-year-old granddaughter (Julia Garner) has an abortion.
The no-nonsense, long-sleeve, black T-shirt, jeans jacket, black pants and Jack Purcell sneakers that Elle wears are all Tomlin’s, as is the vintage car in which she chauffeurs her granddaughter around Los Angeles.
It’s a black 1955 Dodge Royal Lancer that Tomlin bought in 1975. “It’s a cream puff car,” she says.
What’s more, the character of Elle is, like the 75-year-old actress herself, a lesbian feminist with a dim view of self-serving behaviour and a tart tongue.
“The character’s sense of humour is flat-out Lily’s sense of humour,” says writer-director Paul Weitz, who created the role of Elle with Tomlin in mind, after working with her in Admission (2013).
According to Weitz, it took a bit of “wooing” to get Tomlin to say yes to Grandma, the title character of which is something of a crank.
“When I first went in and talked to her,” Weitz says, “Lily was like: ‘This character gets angry a lot. Why? I’m not sure I can understand that, or get into that aspect of the character.’ I kind of paused for a moment and she said: ‘I know you’ve seen the video’”.
Ah yes, the video. Weitz is referring to the viral video leaked from the set of the 2004 film I Heart Huckabees, in which Tomlin and her director, David O Russell, engage in an obscenity-laced shouting match.
For the record, that “performance” isn’t why he cast Tomlin, Weitz notes.
In conversation, the actress comes across as unfailingly polite, even grandmotherly – if your gran were funny and prone to the occasional F-bomb (for which Tomlin consistently apologises).
Weitz puts it this way: “In the midst of all of her warmth, there’s something inherent about her that says: ‘Screw you. You don’t own me.’”
Since his blockbuster hit American Pie, Weitz’s films have sometimes struggled to find an audience. Admission’s cast – including Paul Rudd and Tina Fey – made it look like a comedy, but it ultimately played more like drama.
And despite the heavy themes of Grandma – which, in addition to the unwanted pregnancy, also deals with the recent loss of Elle’s long-time partner, Violet, and a painful reunion with a former boyfriend, played by Sam Elliott – the movie is actually funny.
“I didn’t know it was going to play as funny as it does,” says Tomlin, describing herself as taken aback by the belly-laughs the film earned at the Sundance Film Festival. Weitz was similarly surprised. “It played more like American Pie than any film I’ve done since American Pie,” he says.
All of that is well and good, Weitz says. But when it comes to Grandma, which the film-maker describes as a “chamber piece”, there’s only one viewer whose opinion matters.
“In this case, very specifically, I feel like my audience for the film was Lily,” he says.
“The character is so close to her. She was the inspiration for it, but also, if she hadn’t been happy with this movie, I would have been so upset, because there was so much in the movie that was just this perception I had about her.
“If Lily had said to me: ‘I don’t believe that this woman would have ever been with a man,’ I would have cut that. But she didn’t say that. It made sense to her.”
Weitz describes his perception of Tomlin’s sensibility as a mix of the caustic and the caring.
“You can see through her comedy that she is very perceptive about what’s wrong with human nature,” he says. “How selfish we are, and how much we enjoy messing with each other.
“What you hope when you meet somebody is that they are as cynical as you thought they would be, and at the same time that they are kind. That was the main thing that I felt about Lily.”
Dynamite
Tomlin says she could never see the humour in cruelty: “Even as a kid, I did not like cartoons where the cat swallowed dynamite or something. He would bounce back – I knew he would be okay – but even as a small child I didn’t like that kind of cruelty.”
Although the actress describes her input to the script as “minimal”, Weitz disagrees.
“When I first wrote the off-screen character of Violet – this long-term love of hers – every time anybody talked about her, it was in glowing terms,” he says.
“Lily said: ‘Look, this is fake. If these people were together for almost 40 years, they would have had fights and periods when they were on the outs, where they were at each other.’
“I went back and seeded in things, like where Elle says: ‘Violet was the one with the temper.’”
Tomlin knows whereof she speaks. She and her wife, writer-director Jane Wagner, have been together since 1971 and married in 2013.
Although Tomlin, who was feted for her career at last year’s Kennedy Center Honours, continues to find regular work – she and Jane Fonda co-star in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie – she hasn’t had a lead role in a movie since 1988’s Big Business.
There’s already Oscar buzz for her performance in Grandma, but it’s not the kind of performance some might be expecting from a septuagenarian, a demographic of actor that is all too often relegated to parts built around incurable diseases or lumbago jokes.
Weitz compares Tomlin’s enduring cool to that of rocker Patti Smith, 68.
“There’s something inherently youthful about somebody who has the guts to be themselves without becoming resentful or mean,” he says.
“One thing, early on, I said to Lily is: ‘This is a movie about a woman in her seventies. There’s no deathbed scene. The end of the movie is the beginning.’” – Washington Post