Film Review: The Glorias

 

Gloria Steinem – one of the real heroes of the women’s movement – gets her own movie treatment in Julie Taymor and Sarah Ruhl’s “The Glorias,” a two-hour-plus biopic that should impress you but may also exasperate you. The film – based on Steinem’s book “My Life on the Road” – is now available on Amazon Prime.

Born in Toledo in 1934, Gloria’s dad Leo (Timothy Hutton) was an itinerant traveling salesman whose motto was “traveling’s the only education,” which presumably set Gloria up for a lifetime of just that. Most notably, she got a two-year fellowship to India, where she encountered a particularly pernicious form of sexism that could include murder.

Her flair for writing led her to apply for a job at a New York magazine, where she was assigned to write about fashion because female writers weren’t taken seriously enough to be allowed to write about news or politics.

That led to a 1963 stint as a Playboy bunny in New York, after which she wrote a piece called “A Bunny’s Tale” for Show magazine. In 1972, she and social activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes co-founded Ms. magazine, which sold out its first 300,000 copies in eight days. Steinem was the first woman invited to speak at the National Press Club.

Steinem’s life has been both important and chaotic, as she took on one cause after another. Likewise, the film includes women she met and worked with along the way, including Bette Midler as firecracker New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug, Janelle Monáe as Dorothy Pitman Hughes, who taught Steinem to conquer her fear of public speaking, and labor leader Dolores Huerta, whose work with the United Farm Workers is legendary. She worked with native women as well, and the most touching scene is her goodbye to Wilma Mankiller, the first woman elected leader of the Cherokee nation.

“The truth will set you free,” she famously said. “But first, it will piss you off.”

Steinem’s major unfinished work is her effort to get Congress to pass the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), which still hasn’t passed.

“The Glorias” is in a sense an exhausting mess of a film, using five actors to portray Gloria at different ages and occasionally putting all of them together in the same scene. Is it confusing? Yes, especially if you’re not familiar with Ruhl’s style. It burbles along, occasionally stumbling over itself in the logic department. Best to just sit back, enjoy what you see, and be thankful for this life well lived.