The Glorias

When you watch a production directed by Julie Taymor—known for her stage work ranging from the smash-hit adaptation of The Lion King (1997) to the notoriously troubled Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (2010), and feature films like her bold take on Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy Titus (1999) to her psychedelic Beatles jukebox musical Across the Universe (2007)—you expect to see something that, at the very least, will be thrillingly original. This anticipation makes it all the more disappointing that Taymor’s adaptation of feminist icon Gloria Steinem’s 2015 memoir My Life on the Road is nothing more than a generic biopic trying to seem innovative by employing uninspired cinematic and theatrical conventions.

The main technique used by Taymor in The Glorias is having four different actresses embody Steinem at four stages in her life. Julianne Moore plays the mature Steinem, Alicia Vikander portrays her from ages 20 to 40, Lulu Wilson takes on the teenage Gloria, and Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays her as a little girl. All four appear together, sometimes engaging in conversation, on an imagined Greyhound bus trip that serves as a realm of consciousness where the Glorias of different ages and eras can converse and reflect on their shared past from different perspectives.

While this approach might have potential, it not only fails to help this movie transcend the limitations of the biopic formula, it ends up reinforcing those limitations. To give equal weight to each Gloria, the film spends an inordinate amount of time with the child and teen incarnations of Steinem, which has the (I’m sure unintended) consequence of making it seem like the defining forces that shaped this important feminist figure were the usual daddy issues. And when we do spend time with the Steinem many of us know or remember, both Moore and Vikander play her as a sullen figure, oddly disengaged from her actions and somehow weighed down, not by patriarchal opposition but by her duties as the face of a movement even before that movement is born. None of the passion, humor, combativeness, and vitality that made Steinem such a force in the second wave of American feminism comes through in any of the performances.

Most of what we get are the typical biopic scenes—formative moments, highlights from history, and speculative reflections. Some of these scenes are engaging, as is the supporting cast—especially Steinem’s fellow crusaders and mentors—Lorraine Toussaint as Florynce Kennedy, Janelle Monáe as Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and Bette Midler as Bella Abzug (Midler’s Oscar-worthy performance makes even a biopic-hater like me want to see her do the Bella Abzug story!) Taymor and co-screenwriter Sarah Ruhl make sure to illustrate not only the contributions but also the leadership of the feminist pioneers of color that Steinem learned from and eventually eclipsed in terms of icon status because she was an attractive white woman. But the movie still manages to shortchange these trailblazers by spending less time with them than it does with Timothy Hutton as Steinem’s dreamer father. And too often the importance of all the mothers of the movement gets conveyed through ham-fisted dialogue. The flagrant example occurs in the 1963 March on Washington sequence where Steinem sidles up to a random woman who is upset that there aren’t more black leaders speaking at the podium. The woman begins pointing at and identifying all the activists of color in the crowd, giving us their full names and a list of their accomplishments, as if name-checking equals representation.

Even more offensive are scenes like the one at the National Women's Political Caucus, where women of various movements try to establish the Equal Rights Amendment. There we witness Steinem meeting with Dolores Huerta, the Mexican-American labor leader and civil rights activist who founded of the National Farmworkers Association with César Chávez. Huerta hasn’t joined the Caucus because of her opposition to abortion, but Steinem is able to bring her around with the simple logic that clueless liberals still seem to believe will change the minds of pro-life religious people if those folks would just listen to a few words of reason. It’s an unforgivably tone-deaf scene that undercuts and diminishes the herculean struggle activists like Steinem have spent their lives engaged in.

Taymor, a one-of-a-kind visualist, brings none of her unique talents to the depiction of key moments in Steinem’s life. Witness the scene where Ms. Magazine is birthed and named. As we watch one of those painfully false movie scenes where an undoubtedly fascinating process gets boiled down to its essence via characters sitting around and engaging is a conversation that could only occur in Hollywood biopic or a play written by elementary school students, we start to imagine the many cinematic ways the inception of this unique publication could have been illustrated. But instead of using her theatrical powers to better convey the vast amounts of facts and points she crams into her character’s mouths, Taymor indulges in a couple of cheesy CGI visual sequences external to the narrative—thematic recaps that seem there to wake us up as this 147 min film really begins to falter and slump.

Gloria Steinem is a critical figure in American culture and, like the victims (I mean subjects) of so many subpar biopics, she deserves to be viewed in a better light than what’s provided by this passive and reductive meditation on her accomplishments.