Chilean director Sebastián Lelio won the Best Foreign Language Oscar for A Fantastic Woman (2017), the story of a transwoman. For his next foray into English-language filmmaking after Disobedience (2017), Lelio reworked his earlier Spanish-language movie Gloria (2013), recasting the story and setting it in the U.S.
Julianne Moore plays the title character of Gloria Bell, a woman midway through middle age with an uncertain present and an even less certain future. She pounds the steering wheel and sings along to her radio on the way to work in the morning—the faded songs of her youth calling forth memories of freedom before enduring another day in the pastel-colored prison of her insurance agency job. Thanks to smart phones, the ball and chain sometimes follows her home. Gloria’s children are grown and while friendly and caring, they don’t need mom the same as before.
At night, Gloria stops at a bar whose floor is filled with an after-work crowd dancing to the gentle, nostalgic pulse of ’70s disco. She sips her martini and scans the room purposefully. One night her eyes latch onto a stranger, Arnold (John Turturro). He’s sad-eyed and eager, awkwardly charming as he begins to speak. Before long, they have lunch where he announces: “I can’t get you out of my head.”
Gloria is a bit surprised but more than a little pleased—until things go off track. Arnold’s past (present?) is kept under guard, surfacing only in hushed and angry cell-phone calls. Suspense builds.
Happily, Gloria Bell thwarts genre expectations and addresses the complexity of real life, with wavering emotions and individual incidents that don’t always resolve in neat climaxes. Alongside directing the film with a sharp eye for visual detail, Lelio wrote the screenplay, which delivers a slice of contemporary everyday American life with pinpoint accuracy. The problems Gloria faces are familiar: the oversold value of her 401k, the probability of working drudge jobs into her 80s, the forced cheer of customer service, the telltale signs of decaying health, the need for chronic medication, the social banalities—even the realization that unseen neighbors much less the people closest to you might be nuts.
In the past, Moore often delivered her roles with the cool remove of a department-store mannequin. In Gloria Bell, she warms to her part, giving one of the most deeply felt performances of her career.
