Mark Kermode's film of the weekComedy films
Grandma review – there's no one quite like Lily Tomlin
About a Boy director Paul Weitz's brave tragicomedy casts Tomlin as a veteran feminist on a mission to fund her granddaughter's abortion
'Terrific': Lily Tomlin with screen granddaughter Julia Garner in Grandma. Photograph: Sony Pictures
Mark Kermode, Observer film critic
@KermodeMovie
Sun 13 Dec 2015 04.00 EST Last modified on Wed 21 Mar 2018 20.06 EDT
It probably says something about my age and temperament (I am regularly mistaken for "that old guy from Up") that I find the spectacle of a septuagenarian Lily Tomlin beating up a stroppy teenage boy not merely entertaining but richly satisfying. In clumsier hands, this hugely enjoyable comedy drama would have been called Bad Grandma and would have focused entirely on its titular heroine having more tattoos, smoking more drugs, getting into more fights, and having more diverse sex than her granddaughter.
Lily Tomlin: 'I don't relate to any of my life, except the stories I'm telling you'
Yet Paul Weitz's low-budget Sundance hit (which incidentally aces the Bechdel test) has so much more going for it than mere role-reversed anti-ageist slapstick. While never smacking of polemic, this tale of a woman's right to choose (her partners, her career path, her reproductivity – her life) is one of the most rewardingly progressive comedies of the year; one only has to remember the howls of outrage from some quarters that greeted Gillian Robespierre's Obvious Child ("If America laughs at this, America is beyond redemption") to appreciate both the boldness of its story and the sardonic chutzpah of Tomlin's terrific central performance.
Opening with a quote from Eileen Myles ("Time passes. That's for sure") and segmented by bookish chapter headings ("ink"; "apes"; "the ogre"), Grandma follows the ramshackle attempts of Tomlin's poet-cum-unemployed-academic Elle Reid to help her granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) find $630 for an end-of-the-day abortion. Having destroyed her own credit cards ("they infantalise you"), Elle is debtless but insolvent, with only the 43 bucks and the beaten-up '55 Dodge of her still-mourned life partner, Violet, to her name.
Watch a trailer for Grandma.
Estranged from her power-suited businesswoman daughter Judy (Marcia Gay Harden), of whom Sage is similarly terrified, Elle drags her young cohort through a countercultural whirlwind of cafes, tattoo parlours and long-gone women's health clinics, seeking financial help from old friends and older acquaintances while holding forth about Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, from whose pioneering work Sage has not yet benefited. When her granddaughter forlornly asks, "Grandma, do you think I'm a slut?", Elle looks at her with a sense of both pity and outrage before requesting gently but firmly that she never use that word again.
This, of course, is the key to Grandma's appeal; the fact that Tomlin and Weitz are laughing with rather than at Elle throughout. For all her loud-mouthed grouchiness (she outrages an upmarket coffee store with talk of how hard it is to get "a reasonably priced abortion nowadays"), it is the youngsters who are at a loss – those who have grown up in a world where the hard-won victories of feminism have been overturned or, worse still, forgotten.
She outrages an upmarket coffee store with talk of how hard it is to get 'a reasonably priced abortion nowadays'
When Sage complains that she never knew her father because her overworked mum opted for a sperm donor, Elle retorts: "At least the sperm didn't black your eye 'cos you talked back". Later she tells Sam Elliott's Karl (a "biblical" patriarch still obsessed by unsettled scores) "I like being old – young people are stupid."
Cinematographer Tobias Datum brings loose-limbed, hand-held flair to Grandma, which also packs a dizzying array of top-flight supporting turns into its tight running time: Elizabeth Peña as Carla, owner of a cafe, Bonobo (which takes its name from "a very advanced ape; the females run the show, they masturbate all the time, and they don't have wars, unlike chimps or humans"); Judy Greer as Olivia, the young lover with whom Elle breaks up in the film's opening moments; and Laverne Cox as Deathy, who inks a perfect "O" (for orgasm? ovaries? or perhaps Olivia?) on Elle's arm. As for Marcia Gay Harden, she invests Judy with both maternal anguish and childlike exasperation, finding sympathy and satire in a role that could easily have tipped over into caricature.
But this is Tomlin's show, and she makes it her own. When Elle jokes early on about "transmogrifying my life into art", you get the sense that Tomlin is doing the same. Since earning an Academy Award nomination for Altman's Nashville back in 1976, she's torn up the screen in films as diverse as 9 to 5, All of Me and Short Cuts, but it's Grandma that has made her once again the subject of Oscar buzz. Weitz, whose own film-making CV goes back to American Pie via American Dreamz and About a Boy, wrote the role for Tomlin after working with her on Admission, and you can't imagine anyone else playing it with such ease, passion and commitment – all delivered with note-perfect tragicomic timing.
Mark Kermode's film of the week