Directed by: Sebastian Lelio
Starring: Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Brad Garrett, Sean Astin, Holland Taylor, Michael Cera, Caren Pistorius, Jeanne Tripplehorn
You start to sense Gloria's palpable loneliness early on, and her courage to keep on keeping on, even after heartache after heartache befalls her. She has been divorced twelve years from Dustin (Garrett), who has since remarried, but Gloria's love life remains stuck in neutral. Until she meets Arnold (Turturro) one night at a singles club where it is forever 80's night, and maybe, just maybe, he could be the one to break her out of her slump.
But Arnold, even at his most sincere, appears to be hiding something. At first, we question whether he is truly divorced. He is, but what is the deal with his two thirty-plus year-old daughters blowing up his phone with outrageous, childlike demands? Why are they still so dependent on their father long after they should be? Arnold is a bit...off, and poor Gloria Bell will likely have to search for another mate in her late 50s.
Julianne Moore is touching in the title role. She isn't unhappy per se, but she sure wouldn't mind an injection of bliss into her stale L.A. life. Her own children live their own lives (they are the opposite of Arnold's pathetic daughters), but things aren't rosy for them either. Her son (Cera) is a father with a newborn whose wife is "finding herself in the desert somewhere," while her daughter (Pastorius) is in love with, and soon impregnated by, a Swedish surfer dude. Her family doesn't provide much stability for her. Where does Gloria find elusive joy? Wherever she can, whether it be pot smoking or martini sipping or dancing alone to Laura Branigan's inevitable "Gloria", which fits the narrative here like a glove.
We come to care about Gloria, who suffers from the subtle effects of ageism on older women in society. She works at an insurance agency, but the employee ages are skewing younger and younger. Her best friend at work is shown the door just a few short years before her pension plan matures, and the same could happen to Gloria. At first, Arnold reads her a poem and she is in her glory, until a phone call from a needy daughter or ex-wife sucks the love right out of the room. Throughout the movie, when Arnold's cell phone rings, our hearts sink, as does Arnold's. He is seemingly conflicted by wanting to break free from his family's neediness and his subconscious need to be needed. The problem is: Gloria simply isn't needy enough for Arnold. She at least has her boundaries, unlike Arnold, who is run over by his family.
Turturro is at home nursing those inner conflicts which put so much pressure on him. His shoulders sag like a man carrying cinder blocks. They travel to Vegas after a reconciliation, but the reunion is soon ended as quickly as it started. A night of partying follows with an unnamed married guy (Astin), and what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, though that doesn't exactly give her a way back to L.A. And throughout the movie, a hairless cat continually finds its way into Gloria's apartment even though she locks everything up. She would be wise to keep the cat around, because at least he seemingly walks through walls to be near her.
Written and directed by Sebastian Lelio, Gloria Bell is a low-key character study of a fiftyish woman's search for happiness, or at least some sort of excitement. She sings along in her car to 80's tunes, which not coincidentally and transparently reflect her situation at that moment, which is a tad hokey, but the songs are good. When she dances by herself to the tune of "Gloria" at the conclusion, her facial expressions change from joy to uncertainty to sadness over the course of the song. It's a microcosm of what she must feel every day, and Gloria Bell never forces this range of emotions on us. We are tuned into Gloria, and the Moore performance makes that possible.
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