Critic Reviews

Bosco and Coffman make a convincing argument that only Mary Flannery O'Connor could become Flannery O'Connor. Some of her works would probably be unpublishable now, but she isn't writing them now. If she'd survived past 39, maybe the next book after The Violent Bear It Away would have been very different. But, they posit, the Flannery O'Connor we have is the Flannery O'Connor we got, and maybe the one we deserved.

The film certainly does not ignore O’Connor’s attitudes and fictional treatment of race. It just doesn’t make it particularly central to her reputation.

There's a lot of interesting things here and yet Flannery feels incomplete, and — worse — a little bit scared to go in for a much deeper dive.

This biographical documentary of the writer Flannery O’Connor, directed by Mark Bosco and Elizabeth Coffman, is sporadically informative. But it mostly underscores the shortcomings of the varied methods it uses.