Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World

It's not easy to make a film about writing. Many have tried, but I can't think of a single one that works. It's even harder to make a film about writing poetry since, when it comes to the way poetry can unlock emotions more than detailed prose or conversation can, film must do it in ways that either don't involve the written word at all or, at least, utilize the written or spoken word in a secondary manner subordinate to the cut or the image. So it's inevitable that a documentary about a poet, even a great, famous, and accessible poet like Mary Oliver, is going to rely heavily on experts explaining what the work is magnificent, probably reading aloud from books, with text from the poems scrawling on the screen in ways that distract from the oratory power of the famous person with the book.

That's what I feared I was in for when sitting down to watch Sasha Waters' film about the life and work of Mary Oliver. When the movie opened with a close-up of Stephen Colbert trying to read one of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's most celebrated works but getting verklempt, it seemed my fears were going to be confirmed. Keeping footage of an interview subject having to stop mid-sentence because they're too choked up or emotional to continue has become the most trite cliché in documentary filmmaking. It was while watching Colin Hanks' abysmal All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records that I realized, ok, we gotta stop doing this. It used to be powerful when a documentarian lingered on a moment of raw honesty from an interviewee, but by now it's a lazy, hack move. Fortunately, the Colbert reading is simply an amusing runner that Waters returns to a few times over the course of her exquisitely balanced biography-tribute-examination of Mary Oliver.

Yes, we do get some celebs reading Oliver's poems (well), and we do have some academics and experts providing context and commentary. But in most cases, these are either people who knew her well or fellow poets who are able to articulate in astonishingly clear, personal, and multifaceted language what has moved them about her work and what's distinctive about her life and approach to writing. (I guess there's a reason these folks are successful poets!) Yes, there is some animated text decorating the screen while people speak, but it's always subtly and tastefully done, usually just the title, not the body of the piece, and done for a purpose.

Even the interviews we might suspect are there just to make the film more crudely populist turn out to be enlightening. For example, filmmaker John Waters (no relation to the director) shows up early and often because he was neighbors with Oliver and her longtime partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook. But as the film goes along, we see they were not only neighbors but close friends and confidants. Waters is someone who knew these women well, and his well-honed signature brand of dishy raconteur-de-force never overpowers this movie. In fact, as an urban-based, non-poetry-minded dude, he provides a nice gateway for poetry-ignorant rubes like me, who don't spend a lot of time contemplating the natural world nor the economic use of words.

But the interview subjects who make this movie truly special are the poets. I'm going to name them, since IMDB, Wikipedia, and Letterboxd only seem to list the actors and media personalities featured in the film, and not the people who truly bring it to life. There is former U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, poet and academic Major Jackson, fellow Provincetown poet Frank Gaspar, memoirist and poet Mark Doty, poet and translator David Keplinger, poet and playwright Ariana Reines, as well as Donika Kelly, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and Nick Flynn. Each interview subject feels chosen and included because they bring a distinct perspective on a particular aspect of Oliver's life and work and possess an incredible ability to express it.

I can't tell you how many documentaries I've had to sit through, as a viewer and often as an editor, in which learned, intelligent people attempt to verbalize what's special about a piece of art or a body of work and come up completely blank. They hem and haw, start and stop, try to collect their thoughts, but end up spouting the most banal and meaningless platitudes. That is not the case here. Each speaker sheds light on something specific, and it's not all fawning and glowing. Flynn is there to represent the literary establishment that began to dismiss Oliver as a one-trick pony after she won the Pulitzer and became famous.

One of the now exceedingly rare pleasures of a theatrically released documentary is that filmmakers like Waters don't feel the need to open their films with a glimpse of every well-known person she's interviewed for the movie, and here there's no sense of desperation that this filmmaker or distributor are trying to hook us with the folks we might wanna stick around for. Thus, when a new interview subject arrives, it signals a new stage in the somewhat linear, biographical structure of the doc. For example, Maria Shriver and V (formerly Eve Ensler) enter the movie at the point at which they met Oliver. For most of her life, Oliver eschewed conferences and book collections centered on women, lesbians, or other communities she was part of, but after Cook died, she became more interested in putting herself out there and speaking directly about her life rather than letting her poetry speak for itself. So after years of trying, Shriver finally got her to attend an annual women's conference Shriver organizes, and it was there that Oliver met both of these accomplished women to whom her work had meant so much.

Indeed, we come away from this picture with both a rich awareness of who Oliver was and a wide range of understanding as to what she has meant to people and how her work has informed the culture. The film's simple narrative structure keeps the viewer fascinated by the subject, and though the movie paints a full, multi-dimensional portrait, we leave the theater wanting to learn more, which is the most important thing a documentary can achieve.