I used to date a girl who couldn’t see herself with women long term. (As far as I know, I’m the last girl she ever dated.) Once, over pizza and wine, she told me she wasn’t that into guys, but she’d avoided dealing with any of her queer feelings — before acting on them, finally, with me — because she had never been able to imagine her life playing out that way. “I mean, who would take care of me when I’m old?” she asked me, her brow wrinkling. She was completely sincere. Women weren’t a viable option for her. Having grown up in a conservative, Christian pocket of the American South, she had no cultural script of elderly lesbianism from which to potentially model the trajectory of her life.



I couldn’t fault her. Mostly, I just felt really, deeply sad for her. Luckily for me, I’m confident — or at least hopeful — that I’ll have a gal pal to grow old with, even though I don’t really have much of a cultural script to go by either. I didn’t, that is, until Lily Tomlin in Paul Weitz’s Grandma.

For her first lead role in 27 years, 76-year-old Tomlin plays the prickly feminist poet Elle, whose days-past dalliances in academia as a writer-in-residence recall Adrienne Rich. Elle's relationship with a much younger girlfriend, Olivia (Judy Greer), recalls poet Eileen Myles, who is quoted on a title card early in the film: “Time passes. That’s for sure.”

Time is, at once, Elle’s enemy and her saving grace. She’s grateful for her age: “Young people are stupid,” she tells an ex at one point. But it’s because of the passage of time that she’s lost her partner of 38 years, Violet. Now, it’s a year and a half after Violet’s death, and in the film’s opening scene, Elle breaks up with her young new flame for the crime of being young and new. “You were a footnote,” Elle spits at her. Olivia leaves, heartbroken; Elle cries in the shower.

And time, above all, is the film’s antagonist: Elle’s teenage granddaughter, Sage (Julia Garner), has made an appointment for an abortion later that day. She needs $600 for the procedure before she loses her slot. Elle, who has been “transmogrifying her life” by cutting up all her credit cards, is broke, having recently paid back all the medical debt Violet’s illness saddled her with. To help her granddaughter, Elle takes Sage along on a madcap car ride through L.A. and through her past, hitting up old friends and lovers for a few bucks, hoping the funds will all add up before Violet’s 1955 Dodge Royal seemingly turns back into a pumpkin at 5:45 p.m.

It’s a simplistic plot. Some of the laughs come cheaply: Elle whacks Sage’s deadbeat boyfriend (Nat Wolff) in the groin with his own hockey stick; Elle makes a ruckus at an abortion clinic turned coffee shop for a few beats too many. But wherever the script is uneven or reductive or borderline hokey, Tomlin barrels through it with such hilarious gusto, such bombastic charisma that you can almost forgive the film its few stuttering faults.