It’s high time for a film tribute to effervescent Gilda Radner, one of the few women in the original “Saturday Night Live” cast and inspiration…
It’s high time for a film tribute to effervescent Gilda Radner, one of the few women in the original “Saturday Night Live” cast and inspiration to countless female comedians who came after her. In this heartfelt if somewhat scattershot documentary, director Lisa D’Apolito traces Radner’s path from a childhood in Detroit — where she gravitated to pratfalling even in her earliest years — through her New York celebrity and her tragic early death.
At its best, “Love, Gilda” intertwines the comic’s own narration — drawn from audiotapes, interviews and journals — with reflections from her current-day admirers, including Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Melissa McCarthy and Maya Rudolph. McCarthy, in particular, draws a line from Radner’s hilarious physicality to her own evolution as a performer.
In an era when it sounds downright regressive to discuss the potential funniness of men versus women, it’s instructive to watch the way Radner was adopted into John Belushi’s circle of “National Lampoon Radio Hour” comics and quickly went from being cast as “the girl” in any sketch to holding her own against him, Bill Murray and Chevy Chase. But as the group met Lorne Michaels, and their “SNL” fame exploded, pressure grew more intense, and eating disorder issues spurred in childhood by Radner’s fat-shaming mother would come back to haunt her even as she invented some of the most enduring favorites in the show’s history: Emily Litella, Roseanne Roseannadanna, the Barbara Walters parody Baba Wawa.
The film is, of course, most poignant in its third act as the comic falls in love with actor Gene Wilder, and is diagnosed in her early 40s with ovarian cancer. After wrestling with the question of how to view herself as a cancer patient — “Who could I be, to get through this?” — she emerges fighting: “My jokes are the only weapon against this f–ker!” An appearance on “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” after a long spell away from the limelight, sees her making what the film posits is the first attempt to really joke about cancer on television. “Love, Gilda” is sure to leave any fan in bittersweet tears, and rightly so.
