Zacharek’s Review of Grandma is proof that good critics are hard to find

So much of the time now reviews of new films are written by people who don’t have a strong grasp of film history or, I’d wager to guess, enough life experience. I always get shit for this as critics become defensive but in truth, it is the rare young writer who has the thoughtfulness and wisdom to write a review that can make a difference in describing where a film sits in film history. Some of them do, a lot of them don’t. We’re living through an era where so many of the big names are being dropped and sometimes shifted to other outlets, sometimes disappearing and it’s really a shame, especially for reviews like this one from the Village Voice’s Stephanie Zacharek. I don’t always agree with her – in fact, most of the time I don’t, and sometimes I feel genuine anger at her reviews but you can’t say she doesn’t know her stuff and you can’t say she hasn’t lived life and you can’t say her opinion doesn’t matter. Most of all, you can’t say she isn’t a good writer. Her review of Paul Weitz’ Grandma is the kind of review a film like this needs — appreciation from someone who has experience with Lily Tomlin’s entire career. If you aren’t familiar with Tomlin – how can you write with any authority about this film? At best, you can give a snapshot – test audience style – of how some people might respond to the film – a Cinemascore review, if you will.

But Zacharek turns her review into something deeper, taking this performance and placing it in Tomlin’s body of work. She writes:

Young people are the only ones who ever talk about growing old gracefully. For those actually in the thick of it, the romance of that notion burns off pretty quickly, and wrinkles and creaky joints are the least of it: Growing old, gracefully or otherwise, means becoming the person you were always meant to be, only more so. After days, months, and years of gradual transformation, you wake up one day to find that you’re 1,000 percent you. Your good qualities have entwined so fixedly with the bad that it’s hard to distinguish which are which. By the time you feel wholly comfortable in your own skin, everyone around you may find you unbearable.

Lily Tomlin’s performance in writer-director Paul Weitz’s Grandma doesn’t just hint at that idea — it lives in it. The movie gets off to a shaky start, working too hard to establish the unrepentant prickliness of Tomlin’s character, a widowed poet named Elle. But it gradually settles and deepens into something nuanced and moving, a character study that’s not so much about aging, specifically, as it is about the great and awful process of getting to know yourself. As Elle finds out, even when you think you know everything, there’s always more to learn.

She closes it with:

Temperamentally, Tomlin’s character in Grandma is nothing like the one she played so long ago in Robert Altman’s Nashville, a dutiful, married mother of two who succumbs to the seductive charms of Keith Carradine’s singer-songwriter Casanova. But watching Tomlin here, as a woman who is 1,000 percent herself and could perhaps use a little dilution, I kept thinking of that scene in Nashville — possibly its most beautiful — where Carradine sings to Tomlin from the stage of a packed club. She listens, her face immobile but as filled with feeling as a cupful of tears. She knows that even if he has dozens or hundreds of lovers, this song is only for her. The song is everything, and not just for the moment — it’s something to be carried forward for the rest of life, even after the lover is long gone. Tomlin packed a lifetime of future feeling into those few moments of Nashville. In Grandma she shows us the aftermath of the song. The short version: Life went on. It was terrible. It was wonderful.

Le. Sigh.

Read Zacharek’s full review here and for the love of all things holy go see Grandma.

Lily Tomlin’s interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air is here.

Lily Tomlin on ‘Grandma,’ ‘Grace and Frankie’ and That Time Robert Altman Punched an Executive By Susan Wloszczyna