The Glorias

A feminist icon is placed on a towering pedestal in writer/director Julie Taymor's fawning look at the life of American journalist and activist Gloria Steinem. Four actresses - Julianne Moore, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Lulu Wilson and Alicia Vikander - play the Glorias of the title, inhabiting Steinem at key stages in her journey and, in a slightly cringing conceit, coming together to reminisce, challenge and reassure one another. There are other idiosyncratic embellishments which make The Glorias a slightly exhausting film that is smothered by its reverence for its subject. Although there is a sense of the sexism and vitriol she faced, and how Steinem's childhood might have shaped her personality, many of the rough edges of her story seem to have been smoothed out. Playing Steinem as a young woman, Vikander is too blandly earnest to capture this dogged and courageous character. Moore, at least, is a better fit. But by the time the real Steinem pops up to bask in the adulation, the film's transformation into a hagiography is complete.