147 min | R | September 30, 2020 | Roadside Attractions
Julie Taymor turns Gloria Steinem’s memoir into a four-actress, magic-bus odyssey through one woman’s life on the road. Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander split the title role across the decades. The ambition is real. The focus is not.
Julie Taymor adapts Gloria Steinem’s memoir into a sprawling portrait of the writer and organizer who becomes the public face of second-wave feminism. Four actresses play Steinem across the span of her life. They ride a black-and-white bus together, talking across the decades as the film cuts between childhood, young adulthood, and middle age. The structure announces the thesis. A life is not one self but many selves in conversation. The film cares more about the device than about the woman it keeps fragmenting.
Julianne Moore plays the adult Gloria Steinem with composure and a flat, careful calm. She is the most recognizable version of Steinem and the least surprising. Alicia Vikander plays the younger Steinem with more hunger and uncertainty, and she finds the reporter learning to trust her own voice. Bette Midler plays Bella Abzug as a force of profane, hat-wearing momentum that the film could use more of. Janelle Monáe plays Dorothy Pitman Hughes with a directness that grounds the movement scenes. Timothy Hutton plays Leo Steinem, Gloria’s restless traveling-salesman father, and he plants the wanderlust the title keeps returning to.
Taymor directs from a script she writes with playwright Sarah Ruhl, and her theatrical instincts run hot. She stages surreal interludes where Steinem confronts her detractors in dream logic, including a tornado that scatters dismissive interviewers across the sky. The bus passages shoot in black and white to separate memory from event. The effect is striking once and repetitive by the fourth return. The fragmented timeline keeps interrupting moments just as they build, so the weight of the marches and the meetings never accumulates.
The material is a life of genuine consequence, and the film treats it with respect and very little tension. Taymor reaches for myth and lands on a highlight reel. The strongest passages are the plainest ones, where Steinem sits across from another woman and listens. Those scenes suggest the grounded biography buried inside the spectacle. The Glorias honors what Steinem does without ever capturing how she does it.