The effect is intimate, but not particularly enlightening. Love, Gilda offers a lot of reminiscing, some sweet (and a few heavy) insights, but very little new information about Radner’s life.
* * *
The 90-minute documentary Love, Gilda is a sentimental scrapbook sit-down, so if you’re not a fan of the comedienne, in the aged falsetto of Radner’s near-deaf, terminally naive sketch comedy character Emily Litella, “Never mind.”
Love, Gilda was a spot-on choice to open this New York City’s’ Tribeca Film Festival this week – Radner rose to fame as an original cast member of Saturday Night Live. She was complicated, wildly talented, insecure, and then … gone, in 1989, at the age of 42, after a public battle with ovarian cancer.
Like nearly half the entries in this year’s festival, Love, Gilda was produced or directed by a woman (in this case, Lisa D’Apolito, who did an admirable job on both counts). Selecting this movie for opening night also reflects the now-mature generation that began Tribeca to honor the importance of cinema arts in New York City after the 9/11 attacks.
The aging celebrities who packed the house knew how the movie ends, so, like me, they looked … a little sad. Billy Crystal posed reluctantly for the paparazzi. Chevy Chase hid under his baseball cap. Tina Fey choked up when she introduced the film. Robert DeNiro nodded at the floor.
Yep, these folks loved Gilda.
Unfortunately, so did the people who made – and funded – this authorized film biography. D’Apolito’s tender hand delivers cushioned blows.
The effect is intimate, but not particularly enlightening. Love, Gilda offers a lot of reminiscing, some sweet (and a few heavy) insights, but very little new information about Radner’s life.
Thanks to her years on Saturday Night Live, her successful Broadway solo show, and a few big studio movies, Radner left us a legacy of laughter and great characters – including the doddering Emily Litella, who was the first person allowed to say “Bitch!” on national TV (it got by the censors because Litella was a sweet little old lady, and Jane Curtain’s SNL character deserved it).
Love, Gilda features a few classic sketch clips of the kvetchy, frizz-haired Roseanne Roseanna Danna, “Todd crazy” dweeby teenager Lisa Loopner, and even a failed sketch, where Gilda, feeling the schtick going South, body-slams Laraine Newman for a live-TV comedy rescue.
The best choice Director Lisa D’Apolito made was to allow Gilda to tell her story, in her own voice. It’s hard to say when all these personal audio recordings were made, but it’s a good guess from the tender narration of her childhood, career, and love life that Radner recorded much of it after her cancer diagnosis, perhaps even after the disease came back, with a vengeance. You can’t sound that kind to yourself that unless you know your clock is ticking.
Radner was always a funny girl. She grew up in an affluent family in Detroit, Michigan in the 1950s and ’60s, when that city was the mecca of an auto-obsessed nation. Gilda idolized her father, a successful hotelier, who was in his fifties when she was born. Perhaps because he was too tired to roughhouse with his little girl, Gilda’s dad loved to sit on the sofa and watch her antics.
Radner’s relationship with her mom is glossed over in few words and even fewer pictures. Her mother was busy “doing what she was doing,” so Gilda’s care was left to a nanny, Dilly, who became not only “a sort of second mother” but also Gilda’s best friend.
It was Dilly who suggested, when another child teased a pudgy Gilda for being fat, that Gilda respond by making a joke.
This was Radner’s introduction to comedy as a coping mechanism. “Comedy,” Gilda wrote years later, “is hitting on the truth before the other guy thinks of it.”
Her mother’s approach to her overweight ten-year-old? She put Gilda on Dexadrine.
The film drives through Radner’s eating disorders like a fast-food window. The subject is served up, then driven away. Radner acknowledges in a June 1978 journal entry, “I weigh 104 lbs. and I think I’m fat.”
The words anorexia and bulimia are never mentioned. Neither is Radner’s treatment protocol (other than getting away from the pressure of NYC). Love, Gilda offers no examples of friends, family, or co-workers confronting Gilda with this tough problem. Back then, words about eating disorders were whispered, not spoken.
The pressure, confusion, and embarrassment Radner felt must have been horrific.
Saturday Night Live’s producer Lorne Michaels, knowingly or not, chose to diffuse her struggle with humor. There’s a recurring SNL segment, “What Gilda Ate,” where Radner, in a self-effacing lisp, lists all the things she put in her mouth (so far) that day. Everyone thought it was funny, but some of us wondered, if Radner was telling the truth, did she have a hollow leg or a hollow life?
“She never said ‘help me,’” sighs a friend.
It wasn’t just food issues. Radner, who lost her father to a brain tumor when she was fourteen, had trouble with men. She had so many relationships that she joked she could never watch Ghostbusters, because all those guys – except Rick Moranis – had, at one time or another, been a boyfriend.
Friends describe her as being “very needy.” “Being neurotic,” she writes in her journal, “is the one subject I didn’t have to research.”
Family photos feature a string of boyfriends, including a sculptor Radner followed from University of Michigan to Toronto. Destined to become an artist in her own right, Radner stumbled onto that city’s Second City comedy troupe, followed by a production of Godspell. There she met John Candy, Paul Schaffer, Dan Ackroyd, Eugene Levy, and others. She also met on-and-off boyfriend Martin Short, who shares some intimate recollections about Radner for D’Apolito’s film.
After getting a call “out of the blue” from John Belushi, Radner moved to New York to be “the girl” on the National Lampoon Radio Hour. The craziness got real. Working with Belushi, Harold Ramis, and Eugene Levy was “Kamikazi Comedy,” made more difficult by being the only woman in the group. This was the 1970s, which meant “the girl” was not only part of the ensemble – she also typed the jokes.
In 1975, Gilda Radner was Lorne Michaels’ first hire for his new comedy-sketch/modern music-based show, Saturday Night Live. Michaels respected Radner’s talent, but a big reason she was hired, out of the chute, was that everyone loved Gilda.
It’s hard to explain then, why more original Prime Time Players didn’t actively contribute to Radner’s authorized film biography.
Where’s Bill Murray? Dan Ackroyd? Eugene Levy?
Martin Short and Paul Schaffer, along with entertainment industry friends and Radner’s brother – pitched in with family movies, recordings, photos, and heartfelt remembrances.
No one could blame guitarist and bandleader GE Smith, to whom Gilda was briefly married, for staying quiet about his long-dead ex-wife, lest he be haunted by the ghost of Roseanne Roseanna Danna for the rest of his life.
Radner’s relationship with Smith is given short shrift here – he’s written off as “Gilda’s walk on the wild side.” With no credible evidence about GE’s wild side (beyond his craggy good looks), it appears Gilda up and left him (after her rumored affair with Sam Waterston) when she fell hard for Gene Wilder, who was hot off three hit movies – Willy Wonka, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein.
As Gilda’s voice gently tells us in the film, “For the next two and a half years, I made it my job to get Gene to ask me to marry him.” She got the job done in 1984, when the funny girl and the Francophile were married in St. Tropez.
Haunted Honeymoon brought them down. Radner talks about the miscarriage she had, late in filming. The movie was a critical disaster and a box-office bomb. Then things got really bad. Gilda got sick.
Wilder, though, stuck with her. Earlier in their relationship, we’re told, he was instrumental in helping Radner establish a healthier relationship with food. Now he was helping her fight for her life.
Wilder, who remarried in 1991, passed away of Alzheimer’s Disease in August 2016.
D’Apolito did another smart thing when she invited some of this generation’s best comic talent to bridge the generation gap. Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, and Melissa McCarthy were all visibly moved as they read excerpts from Radner’s journal.
It was disappointing not to hear how Radner felt about her yearlong series of medical misdiagnoses, going from doctor to doctor, being told she might have fibromyalgia or a psychological disorder. Wasn’t that in her journal?
After a scan revealed ovarian cancer in 1986 – more than a year into her misery – Gilda had immediate surgery to remove the tumor. Love, Gilda omits the size of the tumor (as big as a grapefruit) and the pivotal fact that only AFTER her diagnosis did she find out that her grandmother, an aunt, and a cousin had all succumbed to the disease that would, too soon, take her life.
This delay in diagnosis pushed the widowed Gene Wilder to establish the Gilda Radner Hereditary Cancer Program. If Radner was a young woman with this strong family history of ovarian cancer today, thanks in part to early work funded by her estate and Gene Wilder, Radner may have been able to avoid the disease altogether: genetic testing is saving lives.
As a cancer survivor myself, it was nice to see, as the credits rolled, a mention of Gilda’s Clubs. As part of a larger network, her legacy reaches out to cancer victims, survivors, and their families. Gilda would be very proud.
In the movie, a friend called Gilda “clever, blessed, and loved.” I’d say, Radner had at least two out of three of those things down pat. Though they aren’t the same two things, so does Love, Gilda.
The CNN Films doc is scheduled to air in early 2019.
