FUNNY WOMAN
‘Love, Gilda’ pays homage to SNL’s first female superstar
Gilda Radner, the funniest woman on television in the 1970s, was hired by Lorne Michaels for what was originally called “NBC’s Saturday Night” before anybody else — before John Belushi, before Chevy Chase, before Dan Aykroyd, before Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris.
Those who watched the show in 1975 or a year or two later, when it was getting huge and starting to change the culture, had their favorites. But the Detroit-born Radner was the one everybody cherished. She brought a huge smile, a wryly forlorn quality around the eyes, and a fearless attack to every sketch, lame or inspired. Radner naturally gravitated toward the midpoint between chameleons like Belushi and Aykroyd, and more easygoing improv aces such as Bill Murray, who filled the Chevy Chase slot once Chase left to become Hollywood-famous.
Most of the men tried. None of the women got the same chances.
The documentary “Love, Gilda” works different ways for different viewers. For older fans, it’s a welcome excuse to reminisce. For newcomers, it’s an entertaining primer on Radner’s life, times, demons and famous inventions.
Chief among those inventions were “Weekend Update” contributors Roseanne Roseannadanna and sweet, addled Emily Litella, wondering why everyone’s complaining about all the “violins” on television. Radner based Litella on her nanny, Dibby, the caretaker she considered “a second mother” and the one who did not bug her about her weight the way her birth mother did.
Director Lisa D’Apolito throws no stones in “Love, Gilda.” It’s a quick, breezy, tactful account. Current and recent “SNL” performers, including Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler and Melissa McCarthy, appear in the movie, reading excerpts from Radner’s journals, and speaking from the heart about what Radner’s presence on “SNL” meant to their younger selves. (Poehler acknowledges that her own early “SNL” contributions tended to be “weak, 2.0 versions” of characters Radner created decades earlier.)
Radner’s father, whom she adored, died when Gilda was barely a teenager. By then, her mother, who preferred a warmer climate than
Michigan’s, relocated the family to Florida for four months every year. The routine didn’t help young Gilda feel settled or attached in any lasting way. Her mother needled her about Gilda’s weight fluctuations; Dexedrine like diet pills became a staple, and Gilda put up with a depressing amount of verbal bullying at school.
“If they call ya fat,” Dibby once told her, “just make a joke about it and laugh.” That became Radner’s first valuable performance lesson; comedy, we hear Radner say in “Love, Gilda,” means “hitting on the truth before the other guy thinks of it.”
She sought reassurance and confidence, often by way of relationships. Toward the end of her years at the University of Michigan, Radner followed Canadian sculptor Jeffrey Rubinoff back to Toronto. There she was cast in the Toronto company of “Godspell,” which included Martin Short, Paul Shaffer and Victor Garber. This led to Toronto’s Second City company and, in New York, “The National Lampoon Radio Hour.” “Saturday Night Live” beckoned at exactly the right time.
Once the alpha males started leaving “SNL,” the pressure to carry the show shifted to Radner, who never developed a film career. After a brief marriage to guitarist G.E. Smith (later musical director on “SNL”), Radner found a longsought love match in Gene Wilder. Her cancer diagnosis takes “Love, Gilda” into what its subject left behind: a best-selling 1989 autobiography, published two weeks after her death, and the Cancer Support Community affiliated Gilda’s Clubs nationwide.
“Being funny got me famous,” Radner once wrote. “And being famous is almost as bad for dating as being funny.” She loved the attention and resented the intrusion. “Being an underdog and a voyeur,” Radner once said, “makes comedy possible.” Where does celebrity fit into that?
If “Love, Gilda” stays on the surface, the surface is nonetheless compelling, and sad. And not only sad; its subject was lit from within, and too busy going for broke in hilarious ways, one creation and interaction at a time.