Mark Reviews Movies: RAISE HELL: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MOLLY IVINS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 12, 2019

If a documentary filmmaker finds the right person, that's about half the battle of making a biographical approach engaging. Director Janice Engel certainly found the right person in Molly Ivins, the Texas political columnist who became sort-of famous across the country for her no-nonsense, wholly blunt style of writing and speaking. With the way its edited, Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins almost serves as a lengthy comedic monologue by the eponymous writer, in which she discusses her life, her career, and the assorted faults of various politicians and ways of political thinking throughout the decades.

If it were just about anyone else, we might not think of such an uncomplicated approach to tracking a person's life in such a way. Such was the way of Ivins, though, who clearly didn't put up with "bull pucky," as she calls it at one point here, but wasn't going to let her frustration with the system or specific people get in the way of a pointed verbal barb. Engel's movie is filled with them, straight from Ivins' mouth via assorted interviews and speeches.

The focus on the various political issues, climates, and personalities gives this recounting of Ivins' career, which is pretty much a chronological one, a little more relevance. The fact that it's mostly Ivins doing the talking—albeit with interruptions from a group of talking heads (other news media personalities and family members)—gives the movie its only real bite.

After the requisite discussion of Ivins' childhood (with attention drawn to her stern, conservative father), the rest of the movie follows the subject's career. She goes from a Texas newspaper, to Minneapolis, to the New York Times (There's some amusing stuff about how the editor would re-word her more colorful language), and back to Texas again, where she would spend the rest of her life (She died in 2007, after a recurrence of cancer), although her column became a syndicated hit.

The movie's personality solely comes from Ivins, who would take on state-level politics with the same devastating, irritated humor that she would later use against George W. Bush, whose Texas origins made her a national expert of sorts on the candidate-then-President. Her voice comes through strongly in Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins, which is the best that can be said of this otherwise pedestrian documentary.

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