Review: Gloria Bell Could Have Been an Expectation-Ducking Comedy

The film’s open-ended narrative tends to be undermined by the simplicity of its thematic signifiers.

Gloria Bell
Photo: A24

The open-ended narratives of Sebastián Lelio’s films tend to be undermined by the plodding simplicity of his thematic signifiers. This issue particularly plagues his latest film, Gloria Bell, an English-language remake of Gloria, the director’s breakout 2013 dramedy about the complications of dating as a middle-aged person. A divorced insurance agent looking for love, Gloria (Julianne Moore) is introduced as a series of tropes: She enjoys a loving, if mildly distant, relationship with her two children, Peter (Michael Cera) and Anne (Caren Pistorius), and occupies her free time with various bougie forms of relaxation, such as yoga and laugh therapy. Gloria emits an effervescent energy, but, not surprisingly, beneath that sunny exterior lies a sad, lonely woman afraid of getting older.

Gloria’s two-dimensionality is thrown into further relief when she meets Arnold (John Turturro), a nebbish and introverted man who’s plagued by his unseen ex-wife, as well as by his two adult daughters, who only appear once in a fleeting image but still make a mighty impression as caricatures of millennial dependency. Gradually, Arnold reveals quirky depths that complicate his shy charms, as his extreme insecurity begins to suggest a holdover from the days when he was obese, and his inability to ignore his kids’ incessant demands suggests their dependency on him cuts both ways. If Gloria can often be too open, Arnold is guarded to mysterious ends, and soon he reveals a jealous streak that manifests as petulance.

This comes to a head in the film’s best scene, wherein Gloria takes Arnold to a party to meet her family, including her ex-husband, Dustin (Brad Garrett). The festivities begin pleasantly enough, but the more Gloria’s kids ask questions about Arnold, the more their tone starts to feel like an interrogation, and Arnold grows more withdrawn. Then, Gloria and Dustin get caught up in nostalgic remembrances as Peter and Anne join in, unwittingly excluding Arnold from their conversation. Increasingly, Leilo marginalizes Arnold in the frame, placing him at the edge of shots and often rendering him in soft focus. Despite being visually obscured, Arnold’s resentment is unmistakable, and his tacit exasperation makes for wonderfully subtle comedy. At last, he excuses himself, only to sneak out of the building to the confusion, worry, and irritation of the other guests, then proceeds to ghost Gloria for days.

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The elegance with which that scene exposes the ugly, childish behavior that these middle-aged characters are capable of sets up a sly, expectation-ducking comedy, but Gloria Bell slips into an interminable series of repetitions in which the protagonist rejects Arnold for one of his disappearing acts, only to forgive him out of fear of losing out on her last shot at love. Swathes of the film are devoted to Gloria ignoring Arnold’s phone calls when he attempts to apologize for his actions, yet the film skips over the more difficult processes of acceptance that bridge such scenes with subsequent moments of post-reconciliation dates.

Moore can sometimes err on the side of melodramatic, but here she’s too often inert, falling back on impassive reactions that render Gloria a purely figure, one without her own complex motivations. Even the woman’s chipper social presentation has the dull nature of routine to it, lacking the more manic desperation that might have elevated the film to full comedy.

As ever in Leilo films, characters speak their inner thoughts with clumsy bluntness. One of Gloria’s older co-workers (Barbara Sukowa) confides that she’s terrified of having such a poor retirement plan that she’ll have to work until she dies, an economic fear loosely echoed in Gloria’s mother (Holland Taylor) lamenting that she could “live too long” and use up funds she meant to bequeath to her child. Elsewhere, Gloria puts her aging fears at bay by relating a story she read that because human cells are constantly dying and regenerating, no one is really any older than 10. Such dialogue pontificates on themes that Gloria Bell never really explores, leaving pockets of awkward dead air around every attempt to give the story some level of context beyond the arc of a character who doesn’t remotely change.

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Score: 
 Cast: Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Michael Cera, Caren Pistorius, Brad Garrett, Holland Taylor, Rita Wilson, Sean Astin  Director: Sebastián Lelio  Screenwriter: Alice Johnson Boher  Distributor: A24  Running Time: 102 min  Rating: R  Year: 2019  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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