Grandma - The Movie is Absolutely Right, the Audience is Two Thirds Wrong

You know the scene in the movies where a rear view mirror in a taxi shows the eyes of the protagonist, and there’s an exchange between them and the cabbie? Four times it’s happened to me when the driver says, you remind me of… twice and one of those recently, suggesting Shirley MacLaine and twice I was told Lily Tomlin. Yesterday, the eyes the cabbie saw were Lily Tomlin’s in the movie Grandma.

No, there wasn’t a remark that she reminded him of Mary Longe, the shot moved to her remembering a love that made her laugh and took her to a place where transformation was an option.

Ok, I stood in line for that movie, telling my friend three times, not to tell me more about another movie she saw the previous week, so I won’t use up one more word about the plot line here. I just want to say that after seeing the film,  the line waiting for it with us, was all wrong. Comprised of people who looked like us… over 60 with good haircuts and as my favorite, May Sarton line goes, with the “grandmother (and father) faces”… Botox and surgery included aren't who should see it. With a title like Grandma and starring a septuagenarian, its easy to figure that the demographic attracted will be the star’s cohort, but it’s an intergenerational story about love and forgiveness and making mistakes and fixing them- or not in high school, in mid sophisticated career or late career later life.

That Grandma is an academic and author gives license for the writers for thought provoking, funny, smart dialog. That the grandchild is a wise B-student who crosses the street after a dog barks from behind a fence offers a vulnerability that made me care about her safety then and her well being as an adult in development. And in between the generations walks a lawyer at her treadmill desk, doing the things that give financial life to her family, and complicated relationships with the one who came before and the one following… not so much in her footsteps.    They are the cliché sandwiched generations - sour dough, chicken and rye.

Girls, take your mom’s to this movie. Mom’s take your mom’s to this movie. Mom’s take your daughters and grand daughters to this show.  Have the talk... not the one that ends in periods, but the one about who you are and where you are headed. I wish I could.

I wish I knew what my mom really experienced instead of what I made up from what I saw and the highlights she revealed. I wish I had an opportunity to ask her to tell me the back stories of the turning points in her life.

This all reminds me of... (connecting the dots) The Turning Point, a wonderful Shirley McLaine movie about younger and older ballerinas  and, of my own turning point... a Christmas day the first year my son went off to his father’s family to celebrate without me, when I saw Lily Tomlin live in her Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.