In a sense, Lily Tomlin has played this person before. Grandma director Paul Weitz fashioned a superficially identical character for the actress in his last film, the tepid Tina Fey vehicle Admission: as Fey’s mother, she was amusingly counterculture, proudly feminist, drawn to language and a little off-kilter. In Grace and Frankie, Netflix’s uneven serio-sitcom co-starring Jane Fonda, Tomlin’s character is a painter instead of a writer, but little else is different.
Elle Reid, or Grandma, feels like the type of character Tomlin should have played by now. She comes equipped with the zingers that Tomlin can spout in her sleep, but she’s imbued with a depth that the actress, quite surprisingly, rarely gets to dig into. It’s to the film’s great benefit that Tomlin is the face, soul and beating heart of Grandma, a lightly funny and razor-sharp character study that builds with emotional force.
In its first scene, Grandma identifies a wound. The film’s function, then, is to open it up, let it bleed out and document the painful, gradual healing process. Elle kicks her girlfriend out, and is left alone – estranged from her daughter, and with only $42 to her name (she paid off her debts, and cut up her credit cards) – to grieve over her lost loves. Not so long after, her teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) abruptly shows up pregnant, in need of $630 for an abortion. There changes the day-plan: Elle's been around the block a few times, and thus considers herself an ideal companion for a day of money-begging and major life decisions. (Plus, she's fine with keeping it a secret from Sage's mother, alternately known as her own daughter.)
Their journey evolves into a reckoning for Elle, as she revisits slivers of her past to find someone, anyone, to help her granddaughter out. Initially, as they go from place to place, the scenarios play out no less broad than a typical Tomlin vehicle. Elle acts out in a coffee shop after being told she’s causing a disruption; she plays it amusingly slick at a tattoo parlor, where she meets up with an old friend (played well by Laverne Cox) who owes her some money. Whenever Grandma looks to be running the risk of caricature, however, Weitz rolls up his sleeve to reveal another trick. As with his opening scene, the writer-director presents his protagonist’s armor with greater velocity as its effectiveness weakens.
The script, in that regard, is confident. Elle’s past is pieced together with patient rigor, with each scene adding a detail or two to her past and her personality. She meets up with an old flame from 40 years ago (played by Sam Elliot); she broke his heart on her path to self-discovery, and he carries that pain with reluctant resentment in their reunion. She later reunites with Olivia, sparring with her once more in her place of work; Elle cruelly admits to having “loved loving” her before another barrage of attacks. In confronting the father of Sage’s baby, Elle uses her anger to better use, viscerally condemning his refusal to take responsibility. Each vignette in Grandma peels back a layer, with Elle – and Tomlin – emerging rawer, more flawed but no less sympathetic.
There’s little expositional dialogue here, as personalities infuse conversation. The conceit here is not groundbreaking – in the indie world especially, the day-in-the-life structure is familiar – but it works nonetheless. It gives great actors like Elliot, Greer and Cox worthy scenes to chew on. They work in tandem with the script to craft defined characters in an exceedingly tight timeframe. Tomlin, at the film’s center, powerfully guides the film into richer, more complex territory. Her welled eyes and frowned lips translate more directly, and with more impact, with each passing scene.
It’s nice to see Weitz make a good movie. Since his terrific breakout About a Boy, the Oscar nominee has churned out a series of misfires: the toothless Admission, the maudlin Being Flynn, the legitimately pathetic Little Fockers. But, while his work finally feels rooted in something real and hearty with Grandma, he doesn’t entirely escape his shadow. His direction, like so many of his recent films, is frustratingly conventional. Each scene works on its own, but they’re too consecutive, too neatly feeding into the next. The film’s narrative construction is so clear on the page that Weitz seems content to move from moment to moment, all but neglecting what happens in-between. Put simply, there isn't enough breathing room. Every reunion is centered on Elle and seen through her granddaughter's eyes; this limits Sage as a character, and in turn limits Grandma overall, because there's too little beyond the scene-to-scene structure to flesh the relationship out. It's a hole that Weitz dances around, rather than fill up.
By any standard, Elle is a sufficiently complex protagonist. She's added great dimension in the film's final act when, in an explosive performance, Marcia Gay Harden bursts onto the scene as Judy, Sage’s mother and Elle’s daughter. The character fits into half of the puzzle neatly, having inherited her mother’s bottled-up fury while straining to channel it in different ways. But her entrance, again, says precious little about Sage. Thus while Grandma may work fine as a sturdy and poignant character study, there’s no denying its potential to be something more.
Grade: B+