Mark Reviews Movies: TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 4, 2019

To call Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am a straightforward biographical documentary is both accurate and not quite giving the film its proper due. It's undeniable that director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders structures his account of the life and work of the eponymous author around a chronological narrative.

We learn of Toni Morrison's family history, her childhood, the stages of her career, and a happy ending with her winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, cementing her as one of the most important modern novelists. The more fascinating element, though, is how the film uses that narrative as a means to examine what Morrison, the person and the writer of great fiction, means in broader social and cultural content.

In other words, Greenfield-Sanders isn't content to simply let Morrison's biography explain why she matters. He also isn't content to simply allow a recap of her most prominent books, which deal with the experience of black Americans throughout history, stand as the summation of her success.

The key here is in the interviews—with critics, other writers, famous fans, activists, and, most importantly, Morrison herself. Through archival interviews and a contemporary one shot for the film, the author reveals much about her life and her writing with confidence, ease, gregariousness, and humility. That last description isn't to say that she denies or evades her talent, which she knows is substantial, but it is to say that she knows her job is to tell stories in the way and from the perspective she wants. It's up to everyone else to determine what those stories mean on a personal and cultural level.

Hence, we get a film that looks at Morrison's writing and her significance as a writer with far more depth than we might expect. It isn't just the content of the novels that matters, either. Here, the interviewees describe what it was like to encounter Morrison's works, how they were received (revealing a seemingly subconscious form of racism from some critics, who hoped that she'd "expand" her subject matter beyond black characters), and the myriad of ways in which the writer examines specific racial and cultural matters unapologetically and without fear.

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am is both a biography and an appreciation of the author. If the film sometimes focuses too much on a simple form of the former, it more than compensates with a thoughtful approach to the latter.

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