I do not think that Gloria Bell was marketed properly. I love Julianne Moore, but she is no guarantee of a quality film. She had a role in The Ladies Man at a point in her career when she was getting textured, complex acting roles. Watching a woman in her fifties who likes to dance was never going to get me to the theaters. If I wanted to see a woman in her fifties dance, I would get a group of friends together and go out dancing until it was time to prepare for bed around 8 PMish because I am a grown ass woman with a day job. Also it is not such a stretch that Moore, who played a porn star in Boogie Nights, would be a partying divorcee in her fifties. Moviegoers do not live in a vacuum, and we tend to associate actors with their roles and make up connections between their past unrelated characters. None of these features in the story makes people run to the theater to demand tickets
Instead Gloria Bell’s marketing should have stressed that Sebastian Lelio directed it, especially since his worldwide critically acclaimed A Fantastic Woman was such an internationally respected hit. I actually knew that he directed it, but I still decided not to see it in theaters. I have a rule. I do not watch American remakes of foreign films because the original foreign film is usually better. I refuse to see the American remake in theaters if I am aware of the existence of an original foreign film. I wait until the American remake is available for home viewing then watch the original foreign film and the American remake in one sitting to compare and contrast the films. I usually prefer the original, but occasionally an American remake takes the lead.
Gloria Bell is a remake of a film that Lelio made in Chile called Gloria. Lelio remade his own film, which puts him in auteur company with Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Haneke, Takashi Shimizu, George Sluizer of The Vanishing territory. Regardless of how I feel about either movie, I am impressed with Lelio for succeeding at making a movie in two countries and guarding his artistic integrity by making the remake. I am glad that I did not see the remake in theaters because then I would not have seen the original film and would not have appreciated the American remake as much as I did if I had.
This review is the second of two reviews about Gloria and Gloria Bell. Both films are about a divorced middle-aged woman with two adult children who ends up in a relationship with a man that she meets at the club. Plot twist: I preferred the American remake over the original foreign film because the titular protagonist seemed more well-rounded and outgoing than pathetic and desperate for attention. Lelio definitely learned from his first movie that the film needed to feel more like a slice of her life than over-emphasizing the focus on her various types of failed relationships.
Gloria Bell had a job, friends outside and inside the office, multigenerational family relationships in both directions-older and younger than her. Even her complicated relationships initially make sense when people are difficult so I did not think that she was insane or foolish to keep going forward. I related more to her taste in music. Also in this version, she likes the cat!
Gloria Bell feels more like a movie than Gloria because the cast is well known and filled with recognizable, remarkable actors. John Turturro plays her love interest. Holland Taylor plays the protagonist’s mom. Michael Cera plays the protagonist’s son. Brad Garrett and Jeanne Tripplehorn play her ex and her ex’s new wife. Rita Wilson plays her friend, and Barbara Sukowa, an amazing German actor, plays her work friend. Even without a good director, viewers were going to have a good time watching these actors play against each other.
If there is a negative to having such an amazing cast, Gloria Bell feels less realistic than its original antecedent. Gloria was remarkable for examining mature adults in a sexual, romantic relationship without glamorizing it whereas any man or woman regardless of age would not mind being like Turturro or Moore on their worst day. Moore does not get enough credit for aging well because we never think of her as aging. She has not noticeably changed. So the narrative innately hits differently than the original. It plays like a traditional romance drama, which actually makes the actual denouement more radical than a relief. Since American adult characters seem to be in a state of perpetual youth, the way that the characters occupy their free time feels less inappropriate, less alarming and not a sign of immaturity than the original foreign film. Watch any American film about mature adults, and you can set your clock to when the protagonist loosens up by smoking a joint. Less alarm bells went off for me while watching this iteration of the story.
Lelio struggled to find the American socio-economic, political parallels that would resonate as effectively in Gloria Bell as he did in Gloria, which was set in his homeland, Chile. He makes it timeless by steering clear of Presidon’t, but the best films set in America find ways to address life post November 2016 so he shows his lack of familiarity with the US by deciding to avoid it. Instead the characters address more generic, universal ailments such as the economy and climate change, but altering the brunch conversation to gun control actually ended up working with a plot point that is depicted in both versions. Even though it has been almost a year since I watched both movies, I still have no idea what I think of this development and what it means for the deeper significance of the American remake. It feels complex and messier though more overt. An intellectual, arms’ length criticism translates into a cathartic, harmless, but clear acquiescence to what initially seems like a black and white moral issue. It is definitely a very American way of dealing with a problem by an unlikely person. Even though I do not necessarily think that it is a deliberate commentary on the latent familiarities between the fifty-two percent versus the forty-eight percent, it definitely feels like it is there. The way that we imagine ourselves versus the way that people actually act are two very different things, and though we cheer the protagonist in both versions for taking such decisive action, and it is ultimately harmless, it is still on some level criminal, definitely inappropriate and transgressive, but there are zero ramifications because of the gender of the perpetrator and where the action falls on the spectrum of bad behavior. It is interesting what we accept and laud depending on the person who acts. The lack of law enforcement consequences in both is actually more germane to American political discourse.
I heartily recommend that you watch Gloria Bell if you like the cast, but if you want to be an erudite film consumer, you have to watch Gloria first. Both movies struck completely different chords in me though they are largely the same in terms of content, but I think that Lelio’s story improved with revisions, and I enjoyed the remake though ordinarily, without Moore, I would never have contemplated watching it based on the story summary.