Robert Altman gave her good parts three times (in Nashville, Short Cuts and A Prairie Home Companion), but Lily Tomlin, one of the doyennes of American comedy, has had a big-screen career remarkably short of credits.
This low-budget indie, written just for her, gives the septuagenarian something to sink her horsey teeth into and she chews it up with gusto.
She's the title character, Elle Reid, an academic and poet in the autumn of both careers. Life has dealt her some bad hands, as we will learn, and she has responded by settling into a pre-dotage of curdled misanthropy: in the first scene, she's dumping her girlfriend, an ex-student barely half her age, with the kiss-off line that she's a footnote and should leave her key on the coffee table.
Enter Sage (Garner), her teenage granddaughter, who wants Elle's help - well, $630 actually, for an abortion - and can't ask her mum, Elle's daughter Judy (Harden), a brittle workaholic lawyer whose parenting style has earned her the soubriquet "Judge".
Alas, Elle is skint, but she and Sage pile into Elle's 1955 Dodge Royal (Tomlin's own; she bought it when it was 20) and go on a hunt for the funds, hitting up an old debtor and an ex-husband and trying to sell Elle's first editions of Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer.
