‘Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story’ Review: Well-Timed Look at Novelist

“I pursued the glitz for a while. And I don’t regret it. But I know it wasn’t the real thing. It wasn’t the real thing.” This sentiment, which could almost be poetry or song lyrics, is spoken by Edna O’Brien in one of the final interviews she gave, which appears toward the end of director Sinéad O’Shea’s engaging documentary. “Glitz” is if anything an understatement: The film opens with something of a roll-call of O’Brien’s famous friends, showing the celebrated Irish author in her prime rubbing shoulders with the likes of Paul McCartney, Shirley MacLaine, Sean Connery, Jane Fonda, Judy Garland and Laurence Olivier. Indeed, she rubs more than shoulders with some of them: Romantic conquests include Robert Mitchum. Yowza.

After the razzle dazzle prologue to get newcomers interested with the promise of famous faces, the film proper begins, tracing O’Brien’s more humble roots in County Clare, Ireland, where she was born in 1930. As soon as she’s old enough, the young woman heads to the big city, Dublin, which at that time for O’Brien represents everything that is worldly, cosmopolitan, fashionable and culturally exciting. She bags her first magazine column, 600 words a week on subjects suitable for a female readership, and meets a fellow James Joyce fan some 20 years her senior, which spells trouble when her family learns of the affair through the splendidly old-fashioned mechanism of an anonymous letter left on a bicycle seat. An attempt to strong-arm her home fails, and she marries him. This sets the stage for one of the repeated themes of the film: O’Brien’s attachments to various men who do not deserve her.

Blending evocative archival footage, audio (Jessie Buckley reads her letters and diaries) and new talking-head interviews (including with the likes of Gabriel Byrne, as well as O’Brien herself), director O’Shea collages together an accessible look at a life seemingly lived to the full. “I learned the hard way to know what I had, to hold my own ground and to stop apologizing,” says O’Brien in an interview. She’s very much talking about her personal life, because in the footage we see of her in talk shows and the like, she’s anything but apologetic with her various interlocutors — mostly male hosts representing the status quo prejudices of their respective eras. In response to then-topical questions, such as whether the children of “broken homes” inevitably suffer, she cuts a calm and defiant figure. “I don’t think they are traumatized at all. I think they’re only traumatized if they’re neglected.”

As with most documentaries about writers, there’s an inherent challenge in deciding how to engagingly represent the work itself; it’s not like showing the work of a painter or filmmaker. Having other writers analyze O’Brien’s writerly qualities helps: Witness Andrew O’Hagan (Caledonian Road) popping up to observe how “embracing ambivalence and uncertainty, trying to understand the look of hatred in the eye of your enemy is … an instinct for a writer.” But inevitably, it’s O’Brien’s own words that do the job most fittingly, whether it’s quotes from her 34 books or extracts from her correspondence and diaries, which seem to read just as lyrically as the published prose.

When she’s falling for a married guy described as “the ideal family man” by The Telegraph, she writes about being “on the high trapeze of the commencement of love”, acknowledging “the rapture and ruptures of an affair” with a sensitivity to the nuances of language that belies the fact that she wasn’t deliberately writing for an audience. The film shows O’Brien to be a writer to her core, always narrating her life with zest and style, even when not strictly necessary, and retaining, even during dark times, the ability to detach and write about her life as if it belonged to somebody else, or to one of her own characters.

Ninety-three years is arguably too long a time to summarize within the scope of a 99-minute film, and there are inevitable ellisons and omissions. But this is a fine summary, and has the effect not just of helping you squirrel away some fun bits of gossip (like that Robert Mitchum detail), but of making you want to read more of her work, which is surely half the point. It’s not wildly inventive filmmaking, though there are some nice lyrical touches here and here. O’Shea’s film is more about getting out of O’Brien’s way so that her work and life can come to the fore in a fitting tribute.