Unlike its titular inspiration, The Glorias follows in a rather proud tradition of nonlinear films depicting the lives of people so singular that it requires more than one performer to contain them. Still, it’s a rather fitting celebration of the barrier-busting journalist who spent a life of the road, seeking. Seeking knowledge, seeking justice, seeking revolution, seeking identity, and perhaps, the film posits, seeking a home.
That scribe, of course, is Gloria Steinem. Whose storied life is so big and so full of significant moments that it’d feel a bit Gump-ish if not for the parade of women around her, engaging in discourse with the speed and rapport of well-worn typewriters. As Julie Taymor, who directs and shares a screenplay credit, depicts it, the momentum of Steinem’s life could well give one whiplash, but it instead gave her a deep talent for finding community wherever she found herself.
Good people doing good work, it seems, are Steinem’s church, and that alone makes it rather easy to forgive some of the more indulgent choices in the structure of the film. The series of Glorias sit on a bus in black and white and discuss between themselves moments in their collective life. They ask the questions the audience is assumed to have. They challenge each other. They comfort each other. And if it were the only device, it would be pretty successful.
But this proliferation of other Glorias seeps into other scenes and expands into frameworks outside the narrative flow. By turns it is enlightening, a chance for Steinem, who wrote the book on many things including her adventures on the road, to let us into her mind, but it’s also disruptive. Which is to say, this is a picture that preaches to the converted, and our hackles raise without help when a pair of male journalists dismiss Gloria as “this year’s pretty girl pretending to be a writer until she gets married.” Is it fun to watch no lesser talents than Alicia Vikander and Julianne Moore as ascending and arrived Gloria, respectively, hiss our rage and seethe at not having objected? Of course, it is. But it serves more as comfort to the viewer that even Gloria sometimes let a moment pass than it does to advance her story.
But speaking of Alicia Vikander and Julianne Moore, let’s take a minute to note that when you bring two Oscar winners in to split a dream role, you get a lot of star power wattage in every frame. The pair of them make up the bulk of Gloria’s narrative while Lulu Wilson and Ryan Kiera Armstrong supply turns as young and younger Gloria. Meanwhile, the likes of Janelle Monáe, Kathy Bates, Bette Midler, Lorraine Toussaint, Kimberly Guerrero and Timothy Hutton flit on and off screen as iconic figures, both in Gloria’s life and the fight for equality.
Altogether, it’s breathless, and a bit starry-eyed. But it bursts with joy and belief in the possibility of a better world. And if that’s not enough to label it a flawless picture, it is at least quite an appropriate salute to the activist and organizer who inspired it.
The Glorias is now streaming on Amazon Prime.