‘The Glorias’ Movie Review: Ms. Steinem’s Unprecedented Lifestyles Deserves a Greater Biopic

Admire her or detest her, there’s no denying that Gloria Steinem has been one in every of essentially the most transformational American figures of her lifetime, no longer simplest fighting essentially the most attention-grabbing fight of feminism nonetheless also skillfully intelligent the course of the nationwide dialogue, taking concepts that were as soon as even handed radical and making them palatable and urgent to a good audience.

That capacity to utter great and doubtlessly provoking strategies to the plenty, and to inspire notion and action, is sorely lacking from “The Glorias,” Julie Taymor’s field-licensed biopic, in line with Steinem’s memoir “My Lifestyles on the Facet road.” It’s a mannered and muddled take on an spicy field, and even Taymor’s trademark flights of memoir are slightly hit and miss.

Taking the title of the e-book literally, Taymor and co-creator Sarah Ruhl use a bus as a central motif, and the passengers are Steinem, in four separate phases of her existence: The exiguous one (Ryan Kiera Armstrong, “Anne with an E”), the tween (Lulu Wilson, “The Haunting of Hill House”), the young journalist and budding activist (Alicia Vikander), and the founder of Ms. journal and past (Julianne Moore). It’s an opportunity that works when the older Glorias commiserate — Moore’s Gloria offers a rapidly comeback to a sexist focus on-mask host that Vikander’s Gloria couldn’t — nonetheless feels mawkish when, as an illustration, the oldest Gloria holds the youngest Gloria’s hand at an emotional 2nd.

Search for Video: ‘The Glorias’ Trailer: Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander Are Every Gloria Steinem in First Search for at Julie Taymor Movie

Unless Moore takes over the arrangement, “The Glorias” lurches relief and forth thru her early existence, pinballing from recollections of Steinem’s charming nonetheless unreliable father (Timothy Hutton) and emotionally fragile mother (Enid Graham, “The Sinner”) to post-college Steinem traveling thru India and going undercover as a Playboy bunny to jot down the investigative share that originally put her on the arrangement as a reporter.

The latter sequence offers legendary cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto a 2nd to shine, as Steinem as a dozen varied Playboy bunnies climb a lit-from-beneath spiral staircase for a photograph shoot in a Busby Berkeley-esque sequence. It’s one in every of these moments the place Taymor’s propensity for dazzle helps the story she’s telling; much less successful is a childhood flashback attractive an impromptu faucet-dance number, which would maintain worked great greater had Taymor and Prieto no longer slash relief off the dancers’ toes out of frame so great. And as for a protracted “Wizard of Oz” sequence, the much less acknowledged, the greater.

Search for Video: ‘The Glorias’ Director Julie Taymor on Telling Gloria Steinem’s Yarn: ‘I Conception I Knew Her. I Didn’t’

“The Glorias” tries to pack an eventful existence into two and a half hours, and the outcomes if truth be told feel simultaneously overstuffed and lugubrious. (“Are we there but?” gripes the youngest Gloria on the 2-hour mark, and I felt her agonize.) Steinem would possibly perchance well even maintain complications with the hot FX miniseries “Mrs. America,” nonetheless that mask as a minimum provided sufficient right estate so as that viewers came away working out the importance of moments worship the National Ladies’s Political Caucus’ presence on the 1972 Democratic Convention or the 1977 National Ladies’s Convention. (Moore’s Gloria refers to the latter as “a catastrophe,” nonetheless “The Glorias” never explains why, with the exception of to reveal that the Equal Rights Modification didn’t wind up passing.)

Taymor and Ruhl also tumble a exiguous bit short in their portrayal of minority ladies’s voices within the feminist circulation. Whether it’s Indian ladies talking relating to the degradation of the caste system or Sad marchers in Washington, D.C., concerning the horrors visited upon Fannie Lou Hamer, great of “The Glorias” entails ladies of color instructing Steinem about their own fraught histories. Clearly, the intent here is to illustrate Steinem’s education and evolution, and to underscore the importance of intersectionality when discussing complications concerning to ladies’s rights. The results, as a rule, come off as the story of a white girl experiencing deepest explain by task of the trauma of non-white ladies.

Search for Video: ‘The Glorias’ Field Gloria Steinem on the Significance of a Feminist President, ‘Whether That Person Is Male or Female’

Vikander and Moore, two of the mask’s most versatile and empathetic performers, both seem oddly stilted here, as though taking pictures Steinem’s singular speech pattern somehow restricted the relaxation of their efficiency. (One other point for “Mrs. America,” which gave us Rose Byrne’s Steinem, a funny, fluid and ferocious introduction.) All the diagram thru her handful of scenes, Lorraine Toussaint dominates the movie; her take on activist and author Flo Kennedy offers a dynamism that “The Glorias” would possibly perchance well maintain faded plenty more of.

As the movie periodically reminds us, Gloria Steinem grew up loving the motion photographs and desirous to develop into a dancer, and she poured that sense of mask business into a paradigm-shattering occupation as an activist; one in every of Steinem’s huge strengths is working out the media, whether or no longer she is its field or, as the creator of Ms., one in every of its practitioners. Any individual this savvy about phrases and photographs would possibly perchance well maintain to aloof maintain rated a biopic that is, too.