Parents' Guide to Garbo: Where Did You Go?

The question director Lorna Tucker asks in the title, Garbo: Where Did You Go? is a silly one that was answered decades before this film unnecessarily posed it. The answer was known to all who saw her walking the New York streets daily and enjoying vacations abroad until her death of kidney failure in 1990. The clips, interviews, recordings, and family reminiscences are informative, without doubt. As in Tucker's 2023 film about Katharine Hepburn, Call Me Kate, she unearths some fun tidbits in her research.

But, also as in that film, she misses opportunities to delve deeper. Garbo's relationship with the alcoholic John Gilbert is touched on, but nothing is said of her suggested relationships with women. One commenter refers to Garbo's film Queen Christina, in which she plays a woman pretending to be a man, as an example of "early queer cinema" in Hollywood. Oddly, when Garbo's early life is being discussed, the visuals are from a screen test she underwent before a contemplated comeback when she was 35. You wonder if they ran out of images from Garbo's youth. Tucker sometimes leaves the subject behind entirely to seemingly focus on herself, a mistake in both content and tone. The film would be much better without Tucker's own on-camera appearances. Her decision to insert herself is both unusual and unfortunate. Her appearances as on-screen narrator, commenting breathily at times, wearing 1930s clothes and a platinum blond wig, from inside a tiny old-style television box, and other times sitting at a desk with a wall of Garbo clips behind, don't do Tucker any favors. She swans around holding what seems to be a papier-mâché Garbo mask, an experiment that is at best distracting and at worst embarrassing. It definitely adds nothing to our understanding of the subject nor to our enjoyment of the film. It just feels like Tucker decided to throw an audition tape into her movie, hoping someone who sees it might hire her to play Garbo?