Margaret Atwood: A Word After A Word After A Word is Power - a wide dive, but not a deep one, into the author's life
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Author of some 60 books, winner of dozens of prizes and honourary degrees, Margaret Atwood, at the age of 80, is enjoying a peak profile moment as a writer.
The television series, The Handmaid's Tale, based on her 1985 novel, has been renewed for a fourth season And there will be a spin-off series, based on her follow-up novel, The Testaments, which recently won Atwood her second Booker Prize.
Meanwhile, the Canadian produced Alias Grace, directed by Mary Harron and written by Sarah Polley, is still on Netflix. Atwood’s also a literary Twitter queen with 1.7-million followers. And the actual Queen recently honoured Atwood as a member of the “Order of the Companions of Honour” for her services to literature.
Margaret Atwood, reaching her peak at the age of 80, is the subject of an extensive if overly-adoring doc
All this makes it a good time for a Canadian-made celebratory documentary, Margaret Atwood: A Word After A Word After A Word Is Power, co-directed over a two-year period by Peter Raymont and Nancy Lang. (The film has already earned worldwide sales and will premiere on Hulu in the United States.)
More wide than deep, the documentary assembles a great deal of archival footage and documentary materials chronicling Atwood’s life. There are family photos, drawings, and film of her father and mother. And from her period in graduate school at Harvard’s Radcliffe College, we hear from her first husband, Jim Polk, and college roommate.
There are interviews with her partner, the author Graeme Gibson, who died in September. Filmed after his diagnosis of dementia, Gibson continued to travel with Atwood on her book tour and on an extended-family trip to Iceland. We see Atwood alone on a trip to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, commenting to the filmmakers about the paintings. We also hear from numerous colleagues -- agents, publishers, television producers and admirers from Sarah Polley to Adrienne Clarkson and actress Elisabeth Moss.
Finally, we hear, at length, from Atwood herself, in her characteristic wry, dry, monotone, occasionally ending a phrase with a small sniff of satisfaction. She talks self-deprecatingly about her messy method (hand-scrawled text, with lots of arrows). Perhaps my favourite insight though, was her sister, Ruth describing overhearing her sister, laughing aloud at her own jokes, as she writes.
A secondary thread in the documentary is Atwood’s activism in the fields of the arts, environment and human rights. There’s an early poem about the Vietnam war, her work with PEN International, feminism and world events. The Handmaid’s Tale was begun in 1984, a period when Atwood was living in West Berlin, a locale that directly affected the novel.
Atwood talks about how she believes morally one-dimensional characters are boring, which is, to some degree, a fault of the film. The relentlessly positive chorus of comments about her pep and humour and brilliance become repetitious.
Besides, we know that Atwood, over her long and public career, has had her detractors, even if she is nearly always right. There’s no reference here to the 2018 social media backlash Atwood faced for comments on the #metoo movement and her stance on the firing of University of British Columbia creative writing professor, Stephen Galloway, an event, embraced by conservative media as a “feminist backlash.”
The only indication of Atwood’s combative side is from a 1977 interview on the CBC show Take 30, when interviewer Hana Gartner describes Atwood’s portrait of male-female relationships as “dismal” and Atwood shoots back that she might prefer Harlequin Romances. Otherwise, the only negative comment about the film’s subject, comes from her longtime friend, the painter Charles Pachter, who notes that Atwood is the kind of person who always has a ready answer, even when she’s mistaken.
Throughout the film, Atwood is always “on.” And, despite the long course over which the film was shot, there are no examples of her emotionally flagging. Nor do we have clues to the fractured identities, alienation and anguish of her poetic narrators and fictional characters. The New Yorker’s Rebecca Meade called her a “buoyant doomsayer.” What she conveys here is a constant attentive energy and ready answers. Beyond that, her secrets are her own.
Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power screens at the Lightbox in Toronto on Nov. 7. It opens Nov. 8 in Hamilton and Waterloo; Nov. 11 in Edmonton; Nov. 13 in Ottawa; and Nov. 14 in Toronto.