Mark Reviews Movies: LOVE, GILDA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 20, 2018

Watching Love, Gilda, the main reason that Gilda Radner became a star becomes blatantly apparent. The seemingly obvious reason was her talent as a comic actress, but there have been plenty of talented people who didn't become household names and whose legacies don't continue decades after their deaths. Radner's legacy is mostly due to her comic abilities, as well as the tragedy of her death to cancer at the age of 42, when she should have had at least another leg or two of her career left to explore.

To become a star, though, is to tap into the public's consciousness in some way. One of this documentary's many talking heads puts it pretty plainly: All of the men on "Saturday Night Live" wanted to be around Radner, and all of the women wanted to be her friend. If a person can put that particular quality on display every Saturday night to a wide viewing audience, that seems to be the thing that separates the talented people from the ones who become legitimate stars.

To go back to that aforementioned reason for the actress' stardom, I think it was Radner's smile that endeared her to everyone so quickly, so thoroughly, and with such ease. Lisa Dapolito's documentary puts that smile on full display in clips from "Saturday Night Live," through photos from Radner's childhood until her final years, and within home videos throughout her life. It also uses plenty of recordings from the actress, and we can actually hear that smile as she relates the events of her life to a cassette tape.

It was a genuine smile, coming from the joy of performing, the thrill of earning laughs, and the appreciation of an adoring audience. You instantly liked Radner, because it was so apparent that she loved doing what she did. She was one of the best at it, too.

She deserves a documentary, if only because her name continues to come up whenever the subject of the best comedians—regardless of gender—arises, and sadly, she deserves a better movie than this one. It's the usual biographical documentary—structured chronologically, featuring an assemblage of archival footage and personal documents (home movies, photos, and letters), putting a bunch of friends, family members, and colleagues on screen to reminisce about and praise the movie's subject. It's mostly about the events of Radner's life, with a few details about her behind-the-scenes personality and drives, and it's presented without any of the spark that's on display whenever we see the actress performing.

It's probably not a good sign when a feature-length documentary spends almost a quarter of its relatively short length on things that happened before the big events of its subject's life. Here, we learn about Radner's childhood in Detroit, the death of her father when she was 14, her mother's disapproval of her daughter's weight, and how her best friend was a woman 50 years older than her, who watched over the Radner children while the parents were busy. Most of these details come into play later, which means they act as a kind of foreshadowing about Radner's life later on, but the once those issues—her quickness to fall in love with a long series of men, her battle with an eating disorder, how that woman became the basis for one of the actress' more famous characters—arise later on, they're breezed through as just another step in Radner's biography.

The movie does come to life, of course, once it starts putting Radner's performances on screen. It's basically a greatest hits-style collection, with some brief introductions from Radner herself on the inspiration for various bits and characters. Her early sketches on "Saturday Night Live" often called back to childhood, because she never quite wanted to grow up. Emily Litella, an older woman with a hearing problem, was based on the woman from her childhood, and Roseanne Roseannadanna, the bold commentator with a panache for telling disgusting stories, was Radner's conceptualization of what the ultimate, brash New Jerseyite. When in doubt, Lorne Michaels, the show's creator, would simply put Radner on camera to recite what she had eaten that day. That was the strength of her appeal.

In between all of this, we get testimonials (and some gossip) from castmates, family members, and those who were inspired by Radner—primarily Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Melissa McCarthy, and Maya Rudolph, all of whom find a lot of truth in their icon's letters and journals about the benefits and costs of celebrity. There's an undercurrent of depression and anguish to some of those writings, but Dapolito moves on from them to get to Radner's movie career, her eventual marriage to Gene Wilder (The footage of the two of them together is equally heartening and heartbreaking), and the diagnosis of ovarian cancer that would eventually end her life.

Everything that's to like about Love, Gilda comes from Radner herself—seeing her talents again, watching how she finally finds contentment, witnessing how she confronts her final adversity with bravery and good humor. It's unfortunate that the filmmaking here doesn't even try to match its subject's spirit.

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