So in 2013, director Sebastián Lelio made a Chilean movie called Gloria, about the life of an older (late 50s) divorced woman; it must have hit precisely the right amount of success — enough to be notable, not enough to have really made an impact in the US market — because in 2018, he remade a US, English-language adaptation starring Julianne Moore.

I watched the first movie, and then enough of the second movie to satisfy my curiosity about the remake (about a half hour as it turns out).

Both of them share nearly identical screenplays — it’s pretty close to a shot-for-shot remake, with the same script[1] — so I can describe the storyline of both in one go: Basically, this woman — moderately successful (she’s like an insurance adjustor or something), economically independent, and divorced ten years — goes out to the clubs many nights. She ends up meeting a guy whose hookup turns into a real relationship, until little red flags start popping up in the relationship and eventually it fizzles out. That’s not a whole huge storyline, but it doesn’t need to be, because what the movie is really doing is immersing the viewer in this woman’s life, including her relationship with her kids and neighbors and friends.

And the actress, Paulina García, plays Gloria perfectly: She’s got the kind of self-assured confidence that people develop as they age, but still a fundamental sweetness and vulnerability, too. She’s not out there in the clubs desperately lonely, she’s there because she enjoys the dancing. And if she has a spot in her life for a partner, well, she’s still going to have standards.

Besides that, there’s something fascinating about seeing the daily life of someone in Chile. Even dinner time political arguments are interesting instead of banal.

This is, in short, the kind of movie that was made so well there’s no reason at all to remake it. And so before watching Gloria Bell, I was wondering if it would change my mind; it did not.

So the thing is, Julianne Moore is a great actress. But she’s also this giant movie star, right. And her Gloria, in LA, feels more like a movie star than a normal person, even though she’s explicitly not one. Whereas García’s Gloria managed to perfectly capture that slightly-dowdy professional older woman vibe, while still being attractive, Moore just feels straight out mainstream-gorgeous. Beyond that, her relationships with her kids are a little more passive-aggressively needy; her relationships with men are a little harder and more cynical. (And the dude she meets seems more like a creep at first.) It just loses something of the sweetness that makes the original work.

If the original version didn’t exist, the American one might be good; but as it is, it’s kind of a pale copy. Skip it, and watch the original.

  1. Main explicit differences between the two, in the time I watched: There’s way less smoking in the American version, there’s way more smartphones, and the housekeeper character gets replaced by a bikini waxer. ↩︎