Love, Gilda (2018)
Directed by Lisa
Dapolito
Magnolia Pictures, 86
minutes, Not-Rated
★★★★
From time to time extraordinary ensembles arise—a successful
sports team, the perfect symphonic orchestra, an office that runs itself….
These moments are sublime and, generally, short-lived, but they sure are
special while they last. The 1975 original cast of Saturday Night Live was such a troupe: Dan Aykroyd, John Beluschi,
Chevy Chase, George Coe, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Michael
O’Donoghue, and Gilda Radner (1946-1989). And when producer Lorne Michaels
assembled it, Radner was the first person he hired.
Love, Gilda has a
tragic ending—Radner died of ovarian cancer shy of her 43rd
birthday—yet director Lisa Dapolito’s documentary feels joyful. That’s because
Ms Radner was the ultimate shooting star whose brilliance lit up the sky before
fading. Who can forget the characters she inhabited: Baba Wawa, Emily Litella,
Lisa Loopner, Roseanne Roseannadanna…. Dapolito’s documentary skirts a few
issues on her way to a celebratory portrait, but she captures Radner’s magic
and keeps us smiling right down to the bitter end.
Radner was born into comfortable circumstances, a successful
Detroit Jewish family that employed a white nanny, “Dibby,” who was Gilda’s
inspiration for Emily Litella. Gilda was a ham at an early age, though there were
also hardships along the way, including losing her beloved father at an early
age. A lot of people know that Radner suffered from bulimia as an adult; it may
surprise to learn it was compensation for being a pudgy child and teen. Being picked
on is a textbook path to comedy. Strike first to take the starch out of the
bullies!
Dapolito doesn’t give much insight into the specifics of how
Gilda gained and lost control over eating, as she pretty much skips from
childhood home movies to the 1960s, when Radner dropped out of the University
of Michigan to follow a boyfriend to Toronto. There she joined a sketch comedy
group that would later form part of the nucleus of SNL’s Not Ready for Prime
Time Players. Several others came via her next project, working with the
National Lampoon Radio Hour.
Lorne Michaels chose Radner as his first SNL hire because
she was simply funny to her core. Amy Poehler appears on screen and confesses
that much of her own early career involved channeling Gilda. Melissa McCarthy
and Cecily Strong speak earnestly of how any woman who was ever a SNL cast
member knew that Gilda was the gold standard against which she’d be judged. In
a similar vein, Chevy Chase and Bill Murray note how just being on camera with
Radner made them appear funnier. She was also a brilliant physical comic, a
trait that often enhanced fairly lame material. Dapolito includes a sketch that's
the ultimate illustration of this: a Radner/Steve Martin lampoon of Fred
Astaire and Cyd Charisse as if Astaire was a maniac and Charisse a complete
klutz. It’s complete slapstick, yet it’s masterful and hysterical.
The film concentrates on Radner’s SNL years (1975-80) and
her 1979 one-woman Broadway show Gilda
Radner-Live from New York. As such things tend to go, the original SNL cast
began to fall apart. Aykroyd and Beluschi did the Blues Brothers (over
Michaels’ rabid objections) and made a few successful films before Beluschi OD'ed
in 1982. Radner’s career was not as successful. Her first marriage collapsed
before the ink was dry on the certificate. She tried her hand at a few plays,
and made several films that bombed, including several with her second husband,
Gene Wilder. She wasn’t very good at being a non-celebrity civilian either, but
once she contracted cancer, she became an inspiration for millions. Dapolito's
use of Radner's letters takes us inside of her changing career and moods.
There’s only so much one can stick into a short documentary.
Though we indeed wish to remember Radner fondly and accentuate the positive,
Dapolito is guilty of making a hagiography. There’s nary a mention of how SNL
was fueled by cocaine, nor of Lorne Michaels’ meddling introduced the cast to
the serpent of disharmony. We see nothing of Radner’s raunchier material from
her one-woman show.
Dapolito trapped herself within a chronological biographical
arc. Gilda’s battle with cancer was courageous and deserves to be spun that
way, but it was of course, a final battle. It would have been inappropriate to
dwell on Radner’s demons given how the film must end within such a frame. More adventurous filmmaking would have
given Dapolito leeway that could have actually made Radner more human and less
iconic. The thing about true hagiographies is that even saints struggle before
they achieve grace.
For all of that, Gilda Radner was a unique talent and
Dapolito’s film is very welcome reminder of it. It’s also a trip down Memory
Lane, to a time in which the perfect storm blew in a perfect cast.
Rob Weir
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