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‘Love, Gilda’ Opens the Tribeca Film Festival.

Pam PerryGoulardt
Celebrities
2 min read

A documentary of the beloved SNL star Gilda Radner, BY Lisa D’Apolito, opens the Tribeca Film Festival.

Love, Gilda, a moving documentary portrait of Gilda Radner, is a movie that captures the fascinating range of Radner’s talent — the dozens of crazy characters she did on “SNL”,  the way she hardly needed to be playing a character; she could just dance with a hula hoop, and you felt the magic pull of her gift. In the early years, when Lorne Michaels had a two-and-a-half-minute space to fill that was too short for a sketch, he would call on Radner to do a bit called “What Gilda Ate,” where she riffed on what she had to eat that day. Just standing there in front of the camera, with no props or characters to hide behind, she had the audience eating out of her hand.

 “Love, Gilda” is a salute to the complex power of her happiness.

The movie is a  conventional documentary, but that description doesn’t do it justice.  D’Apolito, has interpolated still photographs of Radner from throughout her life, into a scrapbook that becomes a visual psychodrama. “Love, Gilda” is plain but beautifully crafted. It draws you close to Radner, presenting her rise through the world of ’70s comedy as a journey of discovery.

Gilda Radner was born in 1946 and grew up in an affluent Detroit family, idolizing Charlie Chapin and Lucille Ball. Characters are what she did,  because it came as naturally to her as breathing. As a girl, she battled weight issues (she was put on dexedrine pills at 10). She dropped out of the University of Michigan to follow a Canadian sculptor she’d fallen in love with to Toronto.

In Toronto, she stumbled into the cast of “Godspell” and dated Martin Short (at 22, four years her junior), which led her to Second City, which led to a phone call, out of the blue, from John Belushi, who was doing “National Lampoon’s Lemmings” and wanted her to be “the girl in the show.” In 1973, this was called progress.

Second City had a gender-friendly vibe that would defuse the sexism of the comedy world. She was accepted on her own terms. When Lorne Michaels launched his late-night-TV live-comedy “SNL”, Gilda was the first one he cast.

“Love, Gilda” includes clips of Radner interacting with Bill Murray, backstage glimpses of her “SNL” writing partnership with Alan Zweibel; Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, and Melissa McCarthy, and an intimate portrait of her courtship with Gene Wilder.  Her battle with ovarian cancer, which was first diagnosed in 1987, is long and brave, presented by the movie in all its soul-shaping agony. For a performer who gave so much to the world,  to be cut down in this way seems cruel.  But, by the end of “Love, Gilda,” you’ve seen a very full life.

 

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