PORTRAITS OF WOMEN ON FIRE
In telling the story of feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem, Julie Taymor leads a fierce wave of take-charge women directors
Having been famously shut out by the sexist Oscars this year, women directors are again making their presence felt. You can find their artistry on display at the multiplex, on streaming services, and at film festivals such as Sundance 2020, where nearly half of the competition films were directed by women.
Look hard at The Glorias, which premiered at the film fest: a riveting rambling of a road movie from director Julie Taymor that encompasses the turbulent life and times of feminist groundbreaker
Gloria Steinem, an advocate for women’s rights since the 1960s. Taymor has cast four actresses as Gloria: Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays her as a child; Lulu Wilson as a teen; Alicia Vikander in her twenties and thirties; and Julianne Moore from her forties to the present. They all do her proud.
Oscar winners Vikander ( The Danish Girl) and Moore ( Still Alice) bring humor and gravitas to their roles in a way that makes sure that Gloria’s personal story isn’t lost in the sweep of history.
There’s her career in journalism, her going undercover as a Playboy bunny to expose sexist working conditions in Hugh Hefner’s empire, her co-founding of Ms Magazine in 1972, and her partnership with New York Rep. Bella Abzug (a dynamite Bette Midler) to create the National Women’s Political Caucus. These Glorias never stop, moving on to the 2017 Womens’ March on Washington. For Steinem, now 85, these ideals are even more urgent when battles previously won for gender parity, reproductive rights, and the end of sexual harassment are being fought again in the repressive Trump era.
In adapting Steinem’s
2016 memoir, My Life on the Road, to the screen, Taymor and screenwriter Sarah Ruhl never resort to sermonizing. The director is a visionary — see her brilliant stage version of The Lion King, and her dazzling if divisive film forays into Shakespeare ( Titus, The Tempest) and Beatlemania ( Across the Universe). Her visual tangents aren’t for everyone. On a Greyhound “bus out of time,” all four Glorias join together to discuss their agenda. Jarring? Maybe. But these scenes are also essential. Shot in black and white by the great Rodrigo Prieto ( The Irishman), the more fantastical moments emphasize Steinem’s role as a part of a female collective in which the individual only triumphs as part of a surging whole.
The biographical details of Steinem’s life are sketched in as Gloria grows up in Toledo, Ohio, as the daughter of a rootless traveling-salesman father, Leo (Timothy Hutton), and a journalist mother, Ruth (Enid Graham), who was forced to write under a male pseudonym and suffered bouts of depression.
Taymor is out to capture Steinem in the exhilarating act of inventing herself as part of a revolution. And the movie reminds you that it wasn’t just white women on the front lines, either — it’s also such multicultural reformers as Dorothy Pitman Hughes ( Janelle Monáe),
Flo Kennedy (Lorraine Toussaint), Dolores Huerta (Monica Sanchez), and Wilma Mankiller (Kimberly Guerrero as the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation). Taymor’s tendency to rush ahead when we want to stay and go deeper are minor flaws in the face of the exultation that comes from watching these women in action. When Steinem herself appears onscreen, it’s hard not to cheer. She’s built an army of Glorias, men included, with no intention ever of calling it quits.