Julie Taymor’s film on the multiple life stages of the defining feminist turns what should be a fascinating character study into an embarrassing disaster
It takes less than a minute into The Glorias, the director Julie Taymor’s shallow biopic of the feminist icon Gloria Steinem, to realize something is off. Four iterations of Steinem at different ages – child (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), teen (Lulu Wilson), young woman (Alicia Vikander), and middle-aged (Julianne Moore) – sit on an old Greyhound bus going … somewhere, each shaded a strange and uncomfortably wan gray against the colorful scenery out the window. Why edit half the scene in color, half in black and white, like the early iPhoto effects of the mid-2000s? There doesn’t seem to be a reason other than to gesture at depth – one of many baffling artistic choices that turn a nearly two-and-a-half-hour film on what should be a fascinating, mettlesome, complicated character study into an uneven, trite and at times laughably shoddy mess.
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