The Academy Awards always make me miss my grandmother. Every year we’d get on the phone the next day and compare notes on who looked “stunning” and who looked like they didn’t own a functioning mirror. Shallow, I admit, but de rigeur Monday morning quarterbacking for the Oscars. And besides, she was always right.
My grandmother was an elegant, gentle woman with impeccable taste. She came of age during the flapper era and witnessed the creation of classic movie stars: Greta Garbo, Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Clark Gable. She approved of lipstick and bemoaned the fact that nobody got dressed up to go on airplanes anymore. When she was seventeen, she was kissed on a fast-moving train by the tall, dark, and handsome young actor Walter Pidgeon (“Mrs. Miniver”, “How Green was my Valley”). As enamored as she was of the silver screen, she never dialed the number he handed her as he got off the train. Several years later, she met my grandfather, a sharp businessman with a mischievous sense of humor. My grandparents’ marriage lasted for sixty-two years.
After my grandfather died, I stepped up my visits to Chicago to see my grandmother. We would often go to the movies together; it was something we both looked forward to. One weekend we went to see a movie at the local multiplex called “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?”
It had been my suggestion. It was billed as an intimate family drama, featuring a couple of handsome young actors (Johnny Depp and Leonardo Di Caprio). It sounded like the perfect grandmother-and-me movie. And it was. For me. I was knocked out by this moving, nuanced story about the pain and beauty of familial love. And equally knocked out by sensitive, misunderstood, dreamy Johnny Depp. I was quick to pronounce my “thumbs way up” rating for the film as we left the theater. I waited for my grandmother to chime in with her own glowing review. But it never came. Instead she said, “Why would anyone want to see a movie about a horribly overweight woman and a retarded boy?”
I was speechless. Here was a woman with great heart, terrific empathy, and an uncanny ability to connect with all kinds of people. She had worked for Planned Parenthood, been an emergency hotline volunteer, and read for the blind. How was it possible that my sweet, generous grandmother, whom I deeply loved and admired, could be saying something like this?
Some months later, my mother, my future sister-in-law, and I took my grandmother on a cruise, hoping that being with us in the Caribbean for a week would temporarily distract her from her ongoing grief over my grandfather’s death. Every night a different movie was screened in the ship’s auditorium. One night, we went to see “Ghost”, starring Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze. As we rolled around to the pitch and yaw of the boat, my discomfort became more than physical. We had taken my bereaved grandmother to see a five hanky weeper about a woman who is haunted by the love of her life – the ghost of her recently deceased husband. As the music swelled and Demi Moore wept for her husband, I cried for my grandmother sitting next to me and wondered if I should escort her out to help blunt the pain. But when I looked over at my grandmother, she didn’t look upset. I reconsidered; maybe this was cathartic for her in a good way.
The lights came up. I asked my grandmother if she was okay. “I’m fine”, she said, “though it certainly was strange watching a movie while rocking with those waves!” She liked the movie. It didn’t make her sad. It was just a movie.
That’s when it clicked. For my grandmother, and many of her generation, movies weren’t about real life; they were about glamour, fantasy, beautiful people. They were an escape from your problems, from the difficult realities and thorny issues of everyday life. When she saw Demi Moore up there on the screen desperately missing her soul mate, she didn’t see a reflection of her own life, she saw a moving fable. When she saw the less than glamorous members of Gilbert Grape’s family, she was perplexed. These were not beautiful people, not even close to the Hollywood royalty she grew up with; this was not what she went to the movies for. She could see people like this in the grocery store. Why should she pay good money to see them larger than life in a darkened theater?
My take, of course, is different. I’m a documentary filmmaker. I revel in real life. I’ve had long arguments with people much younger than my grandmother about the value and artful beauty of “depressing” films. (“Leaving Las Vegas”, anyone?) But I understand where my grandmother was coming from. In her long lifetime, movies, and the world, had changed radically — faster than she could keep up with. News reports of chaos and violence abounded. She went to the movies to be transported somewhere else for two hours, to a world populated with handsome, well-dressed, well-lit people where it was easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, and real world issues like obesity and disability were left outside the movie house doors.
Times have certainly changed since my grandmother’s heyday. No one gets dressed up for a trip through airport security, and movies are full of the ugly realities of the complex world we inhabit. Both films and audiences have become more sophisticated. But for those two (plus) hours when the little gold statues come out and the world is broken down into winners and losers, we all get to go back to a more innocent time. I wish my grandmother had been here this year to see the Academy Awards. Penelope Cruz looked stunning.
Emily Goldberg enjoys the nitty-gritty world of real life. She has to; she’s a documentary filmmaker. Her grandmother, Evelyn Cohen, was very proud of her work, and the fact that she finally saw the light and bought some lipstick.
