Word: garbos
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Meet Estelle Rolie. A labor supporting left winger, who wears legwarmers or orthopedic shoes, most of all Estelle loves Greta Garbo. Estelle's a fighter; she wouldn't let her son go an a grammar school trip to a steel mill because the workers were on strike. "Everyone came home with a little box of nails," Gilly (Ron Silver) recalls as he scolds his middle-aged mom for her political activities. He's just bailed her out of jail for another one of her anti-establishment antics. But not a moment too soon, because when Estelle hears construction workers yell...
...search for the elusive almost mythical Garbo comprises the plot for Garbo Talks, a new film by director Sidney Lumet. Unfortunately it's not the fiesty Bancroft who embarks on the search, but instead her son, played by Ron Silver, whose screen presence can be likened to a lost beagle. All the time he is on the screen, which is all too often, Silver seems to get lost in Lumet's white washed urban setting. Only when Bancroft appears does Garbo Talks regain its force and almost all of it's humor...
...quest for Garbo, Gilly encounters a motely crew of New Yorkers, all of whom are supposed to bring him closer to uncovering the location of the mysterious actress. Lumet introduces the characters in brief cameos, but these supposedly comic sketches are disappointingly inadequate. They simply lack punch. One exception is Gilly's meeting with a lonely gay salesman on the ferry to Fire Island, where Garbo has a home. As they wander along the beach at dusk, he describes his lonely personal life. Finally, the mute lighting is perfect, providing a discrete backdrop for this sensitive scene. The scene aptly...
...journey to find Garbo like an excessively long road trip. The scenes with the people Gilly meets, like the obsequious agent and the forgetful old film star, which could have been funny, resemble drawn out pit stops. Most of the time we want to tell Gilly to get back...
...yellow of a taxicab, the blue of the sky on Kennedy's Inauguration Day, the pink of a Provence carnation. Her hero is her husband of 46 years, whom she refers to almost solely in terms of his exquisite clothes-felt hats as smooth as satin, overcoats that Garbo loved. Helena Rubinstein is remembered for the beauty of her buttonholes, Clark Gable for the best eyelashes she ever saw. And if the tall stories about kings and playboys often ravel, the shrewdness and impersonal good humor of the storyteller are intact. Cole Porter, of course, wrote a couplet about...