As Elle, Tomlin is Tomlin, which is to say great.
Advertisement
Tomlin plays the matriarch who embarks on a quirky, ultimately endearing road trip with her pregnant teenage granddaughter (Garner). Miserable, mean-spirited and depressed, Elle doesn’t even have time to smoke a joint or hang up a new wind chime before her 18-year-old granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) shows up uninvited, needing $600 to pay for an abortion. Elle is a different kind of film grandma – she’s a feminist poet. She’s also blunt, unapologetic and kind of a jerk. “You were a footnote”, Elle tells her lover, with resigned honesty more than spite.
Elle is angry – as we see in an unnervingly funny mini-breakdown she has in a coffee shop – but not at Sage.
The star of the film Grandma and the Netflix series Grace and Frankie married her partner of 42 years, Jane Wagner, in 2013.
Advertisement
Mercifully short, the movie chugs along with the same faulty engine as the car while Elle stops en route to the abortion clinic to beg, browbeat and borrow from everyone she knows. But then the layers of the onion get peeled back – suddenly, startlingly. In one of the better scenes, three generations of women come together for a moment – very brief – in which it becomes clear that even in the nuttiest families, there are bonds that supersede all that craziness. As it should be. Too much of what works in “Grandma” comes from the subtle touches Tomlin, Elliott and Harden bring to their characters, not Weitz’s script (this severely affects Garner who has trouble making Sage as interesting as her grandmother let alone her mother).
