Directed by: Lisa D'Apolito
Featuring: Gilda Radner, Gene Wilder, Bill Hader, Amy Poehler, Melissa McCarthy, Chevy Chase, Laraine Newman, Alan Zweibel, Lorne Michaels, Martin Short, Maya Rudolph
It is almost a bad cosmic joke that Gilda Radner, after finally finding love with Gene Wilder and some semblance of peace with herself, would be diagnosed with ovarian cancer. After a three-year battle against the disease, she died in April 1989 one month shy of her 43rd birthday. She battled cancer as she did any other issue she had: with humor, self-deprecation, and occasionally gallows humor. "I decided to be funny about what I didn't have, instead of worrying about it," is her quote which sums up her attitude towards life itself. It gave her lemons, and she made lemonade.
Born to a well-off Jewish family in 1946, Gilda grew up in suburban Detroit. She was a chubby girl who liked being the cut-up, and after her father's untimely death when she was 14, she channeled her emotions into making others laugh. Before long, she was contacted by John Belushi to perform with the National Lampoon radio troupe and later Second City before breaking through as a member of the inaugural Saturday Night Live cast. As a woman, she found it difficult to express her comic voice.
There wasn't overt sexism, but she found her ideas were passed over in favor of the men's ideas, and her initial roles on Saturday Night Live were to either kill a few minutes between sketches or stand around with one line in other sketches.
But, with characters like Barbara Wawa (a parody of Barbara Walters) and Roseanne Roseannadanna, she became a late night star. As in the eerily similar The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling, we learn through diary entries of the pressures and self-doubts she faced while being a rising star. She battled eating disorders while trying to remain thin for television, and for the longest time she could not find her footing in her career or personal life. She married guitarist G.E. Smith, but that marriage deteriorated after she met Gene Wilder while filming Hanky Panky, the first of three films the duo would make together.
The best segments of Love, Gilda take us inside the wild life of the first few seasons of Saturday Night Live, which wasn't an instant hit and took about six to eight episodes to finally gain an audience. Gilda worked long hours, burned the candle at both ends, and was lonely, even with adoring crowds surrounding her. As one friend indicated, working on Saturday nights didn't exactly help her social life. But she persevered, and made a name and legacy for herself.
I know I am committing heresy here, but if you aren't familiar with Gilda Radner already, the footage of her famous Saturday Night Live bits and Broadway show will not exactly wow you. The bits are not shown in proper context, and are just pieces of a bigger whole. I also wasn't enthralled with the use of contemporary SNL stars like Bill Hader or Amy Poehler as interview subjects who also read from Gilda's diaries. Maybe the filmmakers wanted to show how long a legacy Gilda Radner left for future generations. My feeling, and this may not be the case, is the filmmakers are hedging their bets by throwing in some stars the younger generation may recognize, in case Martin Short or Chevy Chase were too much before their time.
The stronger parts outweigh the weaker ones by a decent margin in Love, Gilda, because we get a chance to glimpse into a weathered soul who had a brief, but memorable impact on the world of comedy. Gilda Radner died thirty years ago, and even in her lowest moments, we saw the humor peeking out. One of her last public appearances was a cameo appearance as herself on It's Garry Shandling's Show, in which she basked in the audience's adulation even at the expense of the bit. "Well, I've been battling cancer, what about you?" she tells Shandling when he asked what she's been up to. That quote is the essence of her.
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