MARY OLIVER: SAVED BY THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD – Review by Loren King
With elegant simplicity, director Sasha Waters begins her documentary Mary Oliver: Saved By the Beauty of the World with Oliver’s poetry. Stephen Colbert is so emotional he can’t get through one of her best known poems, The Summer Day which segues into Oliver reading Roses, Late Summer before Nick Flynn recites Maybe.
Mary Oliver: Saved By the Beauty of the World follows Oliver’s life and career from her childhood in Ohio to her death in 2019 at age 83 after she’d moved to Florida. In between, there’s rich original and archival footage; rare photographs from Oliver’s estate; and interviews about Oliver’s decades in Provincetown and her life with her longtime partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook, who died in 2005. The film chronicles Oliver’s years of struggle as a writer and her resiliency in pursing her craft. Winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for her fourth book, American Primitive, may have put her on the cultural map but, according to many in the film, Oliver remained an outsider to the literary establishment.
Through interviews and Oliver’s own words, the film offers a portrait of the artist that contains multitudes. Christened “The Bard of Provincetown” by the New York Times, Oliver was defined in many ways by the place she and Cook called home for more than 40 years. Her daily walks in Beech Forest, Blackwater Pond or along the shoreline inspired numerous poems and essays about the delicate thread connecting humans to the natural world.
Besides poetry, the film is anchored by the recollections of friends and colleagues including Maria Shriver, David Keplinger, Frank Gaspar, Oliver’s biographer Lindsay Whalen, and many more. One of the most memorable interviews is with film director and longtime Provincetown resident John Waters (no relation to the director) who recounts with characteristic humor his long friendship with Oliver and Malone that began in the 1970s when he first arrived in Provincetown and worked at Malone’s East End Bookshop. He says Oliver even managed to get him to appreciate nature, a least a bit.
“She made me see the beauty that she saw,” Waters says.
