BEING MARY TYLER MOORE
US, 2022, 119 minutes, Colour.
Directed by James Adolphus.
For audiences who have admired television on screen star, Mary Tyler Moore, prominent from the 1960s, especially on television, The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler More Show, this documentary serves as a biography, and admiring portrait, a summary of her career with a considerable number of excerpts from her shows illustrating her versatility, her verve, with testimonies from members of the cast of each show, from writers and producers like Carl Reiner and James L. Brooks, and testimonies from later comedians who speak with admiration and gratitude. To that extent, this documentary serves as a significant record.
The film also shows the personality of Mary, the background of her family, tension with relationships in her family, a love of performing, success in getting jobs, commercials, television shows, auditioning for the Dick van Dyke show, success, Emmy awards, her own show, her company, MTM, her brief marriage when young, her marriage to Grant Tinkler who managed her company and then the surprise of her divorce from him after 18 years. It may have been hinted at but audiences may find it a surprise to find that she went to the Betty Ford clinic in her late 40s with alcohol problems. Breaking with the West Coast, she had success on the Broadway stage in Whose Life is it Anyway? And then an Oscar nomination for Ordinary People. She encountered a younger doctor, fell in love, remained married to him for over 30 years. There is a lot of footage from the time of this marriage and testimonies from her husband who served as an executive producer of this documentary.
But, there is an underlying thesis in the film which makes it of interest culturally, American culturally. It concerns the place of women in American society, the presuppositions of the wife and mother in the 1950s and earlier, the shifts in the 1960s and more openness, especially exemplified in the characters played by Mary Tyler Moore in both series. The case for her strong influence in changing attitudes of ordinary American women, the viewers of her television shows, is made very strongly, discussions about feminism, Betty Friedan, references to Gloria Steiner.
Which means then that the documentary will remain a significant contribution to the influence of popular American television in the 20th century.
