Grandma

Grandma (15)

USA 2015  79 mins  Dir: Paul Weitz  Starring: Lily Tomlin, Julia Garner, Marcia Gay Harden, Judy Greer, Sam Elliott, Nat Wolff, Laverne Cox

Slight and refreshingly short at a time of impending awards season bloat, Paul Weitz’s poignant Senior Grouch Comedy puts a Bechdel Test twist on the About Schmidt/Nebraska ornery oldster formula. It also gives 76-year-old Lily Tomlin a peach of a lead role, her first in 27 years, which has Best Actress Oscar Nomination written all over it. If the quality of Weitz’s script doesn’t quite live up to Tomlin’s screen-dominating performance, occasionally feeling as though it’s been compiled from a checklist, at least it never betrays its central character’s principles and delivers a richly observant portrait of three generations of women.

Crusty old lesbian feminist poet and academic Elle Reid (Tomlin) has just ditched Olivia (Greer), her much younger girlfriend of four months (“You were a footnote,” she says cuttingly), when her tousle-haired teenage granddaughter Sage (Garner) arrives on the doorstep. Sage is up the duff and needs $630 by 5:45pm to pay for an abortion. Alas, Elle has no cash after finally clearing all her accumulated debts, which she celebrated by chopping up her credit card to make a rather fetching wind chime. So feisty granny and winsome gamine hit the road together in the hope of rustling up the cash in time for what seems like a rather artificial deadline. In a crowd-pleasing encounter, Elle gives feckless and shifty impregnator Cam (Wolff) the benefit of her feminist wisdom augmented by a firm whack around the nuts. She also journeys into her past, meeting up with a transgender tattooist (Cox) and, most poignantly, Karl (Elliott) – a former lover from her hetero days. So why didn’t Sage simply approach her mum, Judy (Harden)? Turns out she’s a domineering career woman who’s as formidable and scary as Elle, albeit in a very different way.

Each encounter provides an opportunity to learn more about Elle’s complicated past, but only Sam Elliott’s performance comes close to matching Tomlin’s. The sole non-two-dimensional male in the entire film, wealthy, much-married Karl turns out to have good reason to feel aggrieved when Elle turns up on his doorstep out of the blue. It’s an interlude that lends the film some much-needed dramatic heft after perhaps rather too many scenes in which the cantankerous, unembarrassable biddy terrorises the young ‘uns. (“Some people shouldn’t be allowed to grow beards,” she tells the wretched Cam. “You look like you’ve got an armpit on your face.”)

Weitz avoids getting bogged down in the abortion debate, simply because the necessity of Sage’s termination is one thing on which all three generations agree, though there’s an amusing encounter with a ‘pro-life’ protester that leads to an unexpected payoff. The generation gap stuff is also well sketched and understated. Judy’s history with Elle requires little elucidation, while there’s much entertainment to be had from Elle’s despair at having nobly fought the gender wars only for Sage to imagine that The Feminine Mystique is a book about the X-Men character and to use terms like ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ to describe other young women. Certainly, the lesbian academic invective is of a much higher order. This must be the first film in which ‘writer in residence’ is deployed as an insult in the same breath as ‘solipsist’.