The Gloria (2020)

Directed by: Julie Taymor | 139 minutes | biography, drama | Actors: Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Lulu Wilson, Gloria Steinem, Peggy Sheffield, Tom Proctor, Korbi Dean, Timothy Hutton, Enid Graham, Olivia Olson

All over the world, on January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States, women took to the streets to demonstrate. In Amsterdam, too, people took to the barricade that day to stand up for the rights of women and the LGBTI community and to protest against police brutality against black Americans. One of the people who took the floor during the biggest march, in Washington DC, was Gloria Steinem. For decades she has been an important figurehead for equal rights in the US. Since the late 1960s, she has championed the right to self-determination, equal treatment and equal rights for women and minorities. Although it is bitter to conclude that her battle has still not been fought fifty years (!) later, it remains admirable how Steinem has lost none of her passion and dedication even at an advanced age (she is now approaching ninety).

Who is Gloria Steinem anyway and what is her story? That’s what director Julie Taymor and screenwriter Sarah Ruhl are trying to find out in their biographical film ‘The Glorias’ (2020). This film is based on the autobiography ‘My Life on the Road’, which Steinem wrote in 2016. Throughout her life, Steinem was almost always on the road, giving inspiring speeches, attending demonstrations or hearing the stories of women elsewhere in the world. Taymor used this metaphor of always being on the road to create her ‘Bus Out of Time’; literally a big coach in which Gloria meets herself in a different period of her life to reflect on events, share fears and frustrations and seek support. Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays Gloria as a child, Lulu Wilson as a teenager, Alicia Vikander plays her in her twenties and thirties, and Julianne Moore is the Gloria in her forties and older. Although it seems a bit contrived (especially because the scenes in the bus are shot in black and white), and there is just a little too often switching back to the bus, we accept without murmuring that four different actresses play the same character.

The fact that she has chosen this construction immediately shows the ambition and the guts of Taymor, who apparently does not want to make things too easy for herself. She also chose not to focus on a part of Steinem’s life, but to capture the full eighty years in her film. You can’t possibly cram an entire human life into 140 minutes, without rushing through life phases or shortening characters. That is exactly what we see happening. The Steinem family is not exactly stable. Gloria and her older sister grow up with the whistling antiques seller Leo (great role by Timothy Hutton) as a father and the embittered and depressed Ruth (Enid Graham) as a mother. Both have a big influence on Gloria, each in their own way. Race adventurer Leo is always on the road and prefers to take his daughter with him (he thinks she doesn’t have to go to school, because: ‘Travel is the best education’). It is through her mother that Gloria is first confronted with inequality between men and women: Ruth was once a journalist but had to publish her stories under a male name; the humiliation that came with it has crushed her forever.

During her college years, she has the opportunity to study in India for a few years, where she is again confronted with stories of oppression and violence against women. Back in New York, she herself is confronted with the inequality between men and women as she tries to gain a foothold as a journalist. First she is ordered to write about ‘women’s issues’ such as fashion and lifestyle and her male colleagues treat her as a secretary. She becomes a celebrity when she writes ‘A Bunny’s Tale’ in 1963, about the period when she went undercover to expose the abuses the waitresses of The Playboy Club have to do. But she’s not yet allowed to write about issues like abortion or the emerging feminist movement. And so in 1972 she decided to start a magazine herself, together with a group of like-minded women: Ms. She becomes a figurehead of social activism – as her commitment is not limited to equal rights for white women, but extends to black, Asian, Latina and Native American women – and with it the Cup of Jut for conservative America.

Taymor has quite mixed up the chronology, which in itself is not a problem and can make the film playful or dynamic. But unfortunately that play with time in ‘The Glorias’ has been at the expense of coherence: the structure of the film is now a mess. We are presented with a lot of events, but hardly get the chance to list everything, because the next event is already announcing itself. Many secondary characters suffer the same fate: Gloria’s circle of acquaintances is full of colorful, interesting characters who spice things up with their razor-sharp observations and one-liners, such as Bette Midler as Congresswoman Bella Abzug; Lorraine Toussaint as the coolest civil rights lawyer you’ve ever seen, Flo Kennedy; Janelle Monaé as Dorothy Pitman Hughes, the activist who helped Gloria overcome her fear of public speaking, and Kimberly Guerrero as Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to be elected Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. We have barely met them when they disappear from view again. David Bale, the man who was married to Gloria for three years until he passed away in 2003, comes out of it completely bare.

Taymor clearly prefers breadth over depth: she prefers to show as much as possible from Steinem’s life than to show the viewer who is hidden behind those characteristic aviator glasses. While Moore and Vikander still have two actresses at home who understand the art of adding depth and emotion to their characters. Their strong performances offer something to hold on to in the messy script. Taymor could have focused better on that and also showed the viewer the dark side of a life ‘for a good cause’ (in a single fragment we see the loneliness in Moore’s eyes), instead of throwing open her bag of tricks for a series of stylistic excesses that feel completely ‘out of place’. A long, awkward silence in response to a TV interviewer’s disgustingly sexist questions would have been far more effective and, above all, more appropriate than the hallucinatory fairground we are now being presented with. It would have saved me a lot of time right away, because 140 minutes is really way too long.

A trick that does work out well is the seamless blending of archive footage and newly shot material. But otherwise it is as if Taymor has too little faith in her cast and dared to make too few choices, and therefore needslessly cluttered her film with things that only distract from the core: the pioneering work that Gloria Steinem has done for the emancipation of women and minorities in the US. Work that all these years later is still unfinished and appears to be more urgent than ever.