Gloria Bell - Review

Gloria Bell

Academy Award Winner Julianne Moore plays a modern day free-spirited divorcee who spends her nights on the dance floor, singing in her car and letting loose at clubs around Los Angeles. She soon finds herself thrust into an unexpected new romance, filled with the joys of budding love and the complications of dating.

REVIEW: The principle reason to see this film is and only is Julianne Moore. She elevates material that ordinarily would be just ordinary. But even as we watch Moore put a great and positive face on her new single life, nothing really happens new that you could not already imagine to someone who is middle aged single after years of marriage.

Everything she does feels awkward no matter how valiant she’s tries to put a positive foot forward spin on her new single life. So early on we see Moore’s character “Gloria” project a person far more vulnerable to lies and deception. Far more sentimental about token expressions of love and tenderness. Far too forgiving to rude behavior. And far too compromising just to “keep her new man”.

Running 1:42 minutes I became a little frustrated with “Gloria’s” unwavering and undauntable desire to do just about anything to keep her man “Arnold” (John Turturro) happy and in her arms. But just as I expected “Gloria” does find that her struggles are not with her man being such a weak kneed jerk. Instead her obstacle in life is of her own making by her unwillingness just to except herself. To come to peace at knowing that her life was not wasted on her youth but rather wasted on her refusing to see and except the remarkable person staring in the mirror.

In the opening of the film we see “Gloria Bell” dancing in a club, but she appears to be joylessly going through the paces and motions of projecting happiness while she moves and struts about the floor to 70’s music. But it's her facade and it’s a facade that carriers her through her early stages of being in relationship with the equally middle aged “Arnold” where she  (metaphorically speaking) is still dancing, not for her own enrichment but singularly to appease “Arnold's” selfish needs.

“Gloria Bell” is a not a great film but it is a solid film. A story that shows a woman slowly evolving through emotional tests into something entirely new and where her dancing now is reflective of a fully realized self-love and self-acceptance all the while being fully immersed into her middle aged life and feeling great about.

3.00 Stars