FLANNERY Film Review – Flannery O’Connor’s World

FLANNERY explores the work, life and legacy of American author Flannery O'Connor.  Throughout, Flannery O’Connor’s writings spice the narrative, sometimes with cartoon re-enactments of her stories or clips of Hollywood film adaptations.  We also get to see her own cartoons and other artwork, many hundreds of photos of her family, her colleagues from University of Iowa University, Yaddo, and other places where she briefly lived before settling back on her family’s Georgia homestead.  We meet many family and friends who knew her best.  We read her correspondence with these intimates.  Her life story, from childhood to college and early literary years and later decades when she endured crippling Lupus—reportedly always with good cheer—moves back and forth between her life events and her professional accomplishments. Interview clips with her many admirers and disciples (Mary Karr, Hilton Als, Alice Walker, Tommy Lee Jones, Conan O'Brien, her editor Robert Giroux and more) are intersticed between  rare clips of O’Connor speaking about her writing and the influence of her environment on her characters.  Her famous quotes, read by actress Mary Steenburgen, such as “I write to learn what I know” lace the story.

A Redemptive Worldview

FLANNERY traces the influence of O’Connor’s strong Catholic religion, a rarity in Georgia, on her life and her writing. Faith is not a small factor in Flannery’s life, we learn—seeing not only the chapel she goes to daily, but also the realizations, one after another, by her admirers of how grace and faith are at the heart of all she wrote. Yet, as the film’s press release notes, O’Connor’s provocative, award-winning fiction about southern prophets, girls with wooden legs and intersex freaks was not only unlike anything published before but more, just not what you would expect from a devout Catholic spinster.  Over the course of her short-lived but prolific writing career (two novels, 32 short stories and numerous columns and commentaries), the film also suggests that O’Connor never shied away from examining timely themes of racism, religion, socio-economic disparity and more with her characteristic wit and irony.  More than one of her admirers notes that her talent was in her ear for the local vernacular of her characters.

FLANNERY Portrays Both The Writer and Artist

In addition to her literary works, many, like this writer, are also introduced for the first time by this film to the writer’s work as a cartoonist and painter.  We learn that at one point her life plan was to support her writing with sales of political cartoons. Most of the cartoons shared in FLANNERY are from her school yearbooks and newspapers, and her letters—fun, with a gift for satire.  In a self-portrait, we experience her self-image as a naïve weirdo crowned by one of her many pet peacocks.