Love, Gilda

I love Gilda Radner.  I discovered her in my pre-adolescence a few years after she debuted on Saturday Night Live.  She was by then a comic sensation who made her name among intimidatingly talented folks like Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray.  She also starred in a movie with Bob Newhart called FIRST FAMILY, but the less said about that, the better.  I did not see the concert film of her one-woman show GILDA LIVE until a few years ago.  You can read that review here.

I loved Gilda for her talent.  She was hilarious and smart.  I also thought she was beautiful.  I was always attracted to slightly kooky/quirky girls.  Over the years I've imagined how the real Gilda Radner, the one not portraying Roseanne Roseannadanna and Barbara Wawa, really was.  The 2018 documentary LOVE, GILDA confirms some of my notions.  She could be painfully shy, but also frighteningly social and confident.  She might hug and kiss you tonight but then go and do the same with some other boy tomorrow (but she'd still love you).  She might be a life of the party who possessed an almost demonic comedic energy, one that would fuel hours of brilliant improvisation among similarly gifted peers.  How could she hold her own with John Belushi, Steve Martin, and John Candy otherwise?

LOVE, GILDA covers Gilda's life in a somewhat slapdash fashion, however, and its brief running time really short shrifts the later years when she battled ovarian cancer.  The timeline is rushed about then, though we get valuable home movies with she and husband Gene Wilder.  I wanted so much more of Gilda in the 1980s, when her career cooled and marriage and maybe even children were on her mind.  The title of director Lisa Dapolito's 2018 film comes from the comedienne's frequent closing letter salutation.  We get snippets of those letters that reveal her states of mind during and post 1970s fame.  A tortured soul who craved the spotlight but loathed it as well.  Probably sums up most celebrities.

Gilda Radner's life would be better served by a two or three part miniseries, where more time could be spent in the very different phases of her forty-two years before she passed away in 1989.  What we get is fine, and refreshingly the film does not portray the woman as some quasi saint.  The strongest portions of the doc focus on her time with the National Lampoon and her early years as a Not Ready For Prime Time player.  We get a few present day interviews with those colleagues.  Unsurprisingly, Bill Murray is not among them.  They dated awhile, and apparently things didn't end well.  Gilda's book offered nothing on this, either.  Maybe Bill will come clean someday.  I'm sure he loved her as much as anyone.