The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Paul Weitz wrote ‘Grandma’ for an audience of one: Lily Tomlin
WASHINGTON >> In “Grandma,” Lily Tomlin’s character bears a striking resemblance to Lily Tomlin.
It isn’t just that the actress wears her own clothes in the film, which charts the course of a single day, as Tomlin’s Elle tries to make sure that her pregnant 18-year-old granddaughter (Julia Garner) has an abortion. The nononsense longsleeve black T-shirt, jean 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: 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 behavior and a tart tongue. “The character’s sense of humor is flat-out Lily’s sense of humor,” 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 a obscenity-laced shouting match. For the record, that “performance” isn’t why he cast Tomlin, he notes. In conversation, the actress comes across as unfailingly polite, even grandmotherly — if your grandmother were funny and prone to the occasional f-bomb (for which Tomlin consistently apologizes).
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.’”
Despite the heavy themes of “Grandma” — which, in addition to the unwanted pregnancy, also deals with the recent loss of Elle’s longtime 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 Sundance. But when it comes to “Grandma,” 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.”