Here is a cute, under-the-top little small-fry could be the minorest of Lumet's minor works, but in some way like 84 Charing Cross Road, which this film's star would tackle a few years later, it is its benign slightness that is its own charm. Anne Bancroft is so good as the anarchically rational Estelle Rolfe in this movie, that there are literally moments when nothing else matters to us, or the film, but what she's saying or doing, how she's saying it and how she's doing it. Estelle isn't afraid to spend time in the clink over grocery prices, makes a scene at one point embarrassing construction workers by scolding them for jeering passing women, and won't go to her dutiful son Gilbert's wedding if it means being a protest scab. She also worships films starring Greta Garbo, whose move from silent films to her first talkie made lots of racket in advertisements with the eponymous slogan. When Estelle discovers she has a brain tumor and six months left of life, which she lives ebulliently, she concludes that she must meet Garbo. Ron Silver plays Gilbert, a Manhattan accountant Estelle even named for Garbo's frequent co-star, feels compelled to satisfy his mother's last hope in spite of Garbo's famous devotion to privacy.
Lumet benefits from the sharpening of his comic touch a decade earlier with Murder on the Orient Express. Thusly, he employs unusual color schemes for comic effect. Similar to that earlier film, a major element is evoking a nostalgia for the past. This later film is merely a more straightforward version of the pining for magic and theatrics of the 1920s and '30s in which his 1974 Agatha Christie adaptation is steeped.
In an inspired serio-comic visual sequence of steps, Silver must laboriously forge his way through the flea market toward his darling mother's slippery dream, unable here to advance in a simple straight line but constrained ultimately to hazard consequences, to go around various stratums of humanity, to confront life's incessant chances and bolts from the blue instead of finding his footing in his habituated refuge.
Somewhat considering Carrie Fisher an exception, the performances are all great. There are genuinely very funny scenes owing largely to performances. Ron Silver is perfectly understated in a way that adds a level of dry deadpan to the humor of a scene. After Kelly Preston's hilariously timed story of promiscuity in the elevator, Silver's reaction when they reach their floor, and especially the cut to the next scene in the cafeteria, where he latches on her every word and bite over lunch, is priceless.
Lumet benefits from the sharpening of his comic touch a decade earlier with Murder on the Orient Express. Thusly, he employs unusual color schemes for comic effect. Similar to that earlier film, a major element is evoking a nostalgia for the past. This later film is merely a more straightforward version of the pining for magic and theatrics of the 1920s and '30s in which his 1974 Agatha Christie adaptation is steeped.
In an inspired serio-comic visual sequence of steps, Silver must laboriously forge his way through the flea market toward his darling mother's slippery dream, unable here to advance in a simple straight line but constrained ultimately to hazard consequences, to go around various stratums of humanity, to confront life's incessant chances and bolts from the blue instead of finding his footing in his habituated refuge.
Somewhat considering Carrie Fisher an exception, the performances are all great. There are genuinely very funny scenes owing largely to performances. Ron Silver is perfectly understated in a way that adds a level of dry deadpan to the humor of a scene. After Kelly Preston's hilariously timed story of promiscuity in the elevator, Silver's reaction when they reach their floor, and especially the cut to the next scene in the cafeteria, where he latches on her every word and bite over lunch, is priceless.