Lily Tomlin’s in full glory in bittersweet ‘Grandma’

But with the film’s release by Sony Pictures Classics less than a week away, Weitz and Tomlin gave the general public a preview of the project Monday night at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center by discussing Grandma, its breakneck 19-day shoot, and Tomlin’s five-decade career in comedy. Which brought Weitz right back around to Grandma and one of its central themes: the gap between Sage’s teenage reserve and Elle’s fierce outspokenness, manifested in everything from her willingness to tell off pretty much anyone to her outrage on Sage’s behalf.

“Julia is just such a natural”, Tomlin said.

In the slight but sprightly “Grandma”, Lily Tomlin flips the bird to all of Hollywood’s sweet old Nanas and Bubbes. Tomlin fills out the role like a tree spreading its branches and roots, though she brings a superb lightness to it, too: Elle’s acidity often has a comic kick – for her, wisecracks aren’t just a defense mechanism but a means of surviving the worst. The two pile into Elle’s vehicle, a bumptiously elegant 1955 Dodge Royal, in search of the money.

During this road trip, the thorny, multi-dead-end map of family resentments is laid out.

The scene with Karl is so cathartic, and Tomlin and Elliott’s chemistry is so intense, that subsequent events the movie has been building toward-our eventual introduction to Sage’s mother, Judy (Marcia Gay Harden, wonderful as an impatient, overcaffeinated superlawyer), and the appointment at the abortion clinic-seem slightly anticlimactic. Grandma is a multigenerational story in which men are side players, though they’re not completely negligible. A visit to a lesbian-run café-where, true to life, the employees’ interpersonal drama is far more interesting than the food-provides a reminder that, although she claims to have a plan to raise the money, Elle has a poet’s impracticality. It’s also a point of reckoning for Elle, who has a seemingly endless ability to inflict damage on other people.

Along the way, Grandma uses a hockey stick on the loutish boyfriend (Nat Wolff) who has gotten Sage pregnant.

“Grandma” is, instead, a brisk, bittersweet and moving film, rightfully devoted to displaying the singular talent of Lily Tomlin ” especially her striking ability to fuse acerbity and crankiness with empathy and humanity, and to find the essential lovability way, way down at the core of an unlikeable person. Tomlin packed a lifetime of future feeling into those few moments of Nashville. “You wronged me”, Karl declares, with a force that shows the hurt is as raw as it was 49 years earlier when the injury occurred, and for once Elle doesn’t try to deflect with anger or humor. The short version: Life went on.