Review of Gloria

Introduction

Even clad in prison blues and Vegas lounge-girl attire, Sharon Stone can’t help but look every bit the Glamour Queen Movie Star, pushing 40 she still looks like she could flatten a room full of pistol-packing hoods just by battening an eye-lid, her disarming physical attractiveness has always been a good substitute for a genuine lack of screen presence. Not even the profane dialogue and creaky Brooklyn accent she adopts in Sidney Lumet’s Gloria can disguise the fact. Much like the sassy Gena Rowlands in Cassavetes original 1980 version (incidentally, his then wife), Stone is simply too glamorous to be kicking ass and saving her skin from vile gangsters, the trouble is, Lumet’s version is sticky, mannered, clumsy and really rather too serious, lacking Cassavetes gallows humour and rough-and-ready action sensibility. The result is glossy, sentimental and only occasionally moving.

Video

Glossier than one might expect from Lumet’s gritty back catalogue (imagine Serpico in soft-light and you just about have it) this is a pretty good widescreen presentation, studded with a few blemishes and inconsistent colouring in a few darker scenes.

Audio

A standard dialogue-driven track, that’s sometimes quite hard to make out, mainly due to poor initial on-set recording rather than thick accents or bad transfer.

Features

Not much to get our teeth into here: the maudlin trailer, an extremely brief, made-to-order ‘featurette’ which is basically a glorified trailer, and about nine minutes of badly edited ‘Behind the Scenes’ footage, interesting for presenting the rigours of hectic NYC shooting and the lengths Ms. Stone will go to convince us she really loves her young co-star Jean Luke Figueroa. They tried, they might as well not have bothered.

Conclusion

Lumet, director of seminal classics like Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City and the frankly masterful Network, directs this picture with his usual authentic, down-to-earth theatrical flair and sensitivity to character. However, the plot is static, the narrative generally uninvolving and predictable and the potentially heart-warming emotional story of a former gangster’s moll, Gloria (Stone) who befriends recently orphaned 8 year old Nick (Figueroa) is mostly overwrought or clashes rather than gels with unexpectedly harsh violence.

Stone, presumably all fired up after actually being allowed to act in Scorcese’s Casino tries hard as the two-bit slut with a heart of gold, forced to protect the young child in danger from ruthless mobsters. However, somehow, she never manages to convince, her overly eccentric posturing at odds with the realism of the piece and the sincerity of her young co-star Figueroa. That said, Stone and Figueroa work up an impressive dynamic that goes someway to make up for the sluggish ponderances of this otherwise hackneyed tale of self-discovery and maternal instinct.