Being Mary Tyler Moore (2023)
In this admiring documentary, a TV icon's closest secrets tantalize just out of reach
The Mary Tyler Moore of the 1970s who inspired producer Lena Waithe to memorialize the star
Being Mary Tyler Moore (2023)
Streaming on Max
I didn’t expect the unexpected from a documentary about Mary Tyler Moore (1936-2017), a talented comic actress whose story I thought I had a decent grip on. But I got some surprises.
Most startling was learning that one of the movie’s producers, the woman who conceived the project, is Black – writer, producer and actress Lena Waithe, who’s said that watching Moore in re-runs profoundly influenced her career.
Waithe and her fellow producers spent five years assembling the footage here. They’ve chronicled the enigma of a television superstar who was vexed in ways that couldn’t have come across on camera.
Those of a certain age, like me, remember Moore from The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966) and her own The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977). Both earned her a sterling reputation as an assured, physically nimble comic actress.
She’s still held in high regard today. Yet as I look back, and watching the clips here, neither show strikes me as transformative, though for a lot of women they obviously were.
I think she’s rightly admired because her Mary Richards got laughs for not going overboard. While all around her were losing it, Mary, even when her patience was sorely tried, defied chaos and kept her focus.
Also, she was no iconoclast. Her inoffensiveness was delivered over the years with increasingly impeccable timing. Her centered, non-neurotic likeability became foundational, a skill honed sharp as a scythe.
Moore proved durable because she turned being “relatable” into a star quality. No male or female in television comedy had done exactly that before.
Yet despite the Moore-Tinker success, their marriage ended in divorce, and as it unraveled, she fell into a chronic drinking habit that would plague her for years to come.
Mary Richards never faced downturns this deep. Yet Moore herself kept on rising in spite of it all.
Even the becalmed Bob Newhart was a little bit nuts in his own way. And the careening, heedless Carol Burnett stomped all over the farcical universe.
Unlike them, Moore was the opposite of “zany”. Nothing about her was nerve-wracking. As Laura Petrie to Van Dyke’s Rob, she was a sweet, well-meaning, never too nettlesome wife.
But during that show’s run Moore’s thinking about her possible impact ran deeper than the rollicking scripts, sprinkled with pratfalls, that Carl Reiner, the show’s main producer and head writer, oversaw.
Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique (1963) was challenging women, and Moore proudly reports that Friedan’s spirited manifesto lit a fire under her.
She went on in ’70s entertainment to perfectly embody the era’s edgy dilemma for women: shut up or speak up. Stifled Edith Bunker and take-no-crap Maude were at the extreme poles.
Moore on set in the show’s Minneapolis TV station with veteran castmate Betty White
Moore stepped into the middle ground. As Mary Richards, she insisted to the show’s producers that the character remain single, a woman wanting to make her mark on her own.
Odd as it seems today, for an unmarried woman to actually live up to those claims was groundbreaking in the sitcom universe.
And for her persistence Moore charted a phenomenal ascent in network television. Audiences and critics were massively won over.
She earned seven Emmys, three Golden Globes, wealth, fame, and accolades for helping women to push back against a society telling them it was too risky even to try to shape their own destinies.
But who was the woman behind the success, this cultural influencer with the indomitable smile?
In her business life, Moore didn’t control much, at least not overtly. Men, so this documentary indicates, held her career in their hands. Their decisions opened her pathway forward.
After the Van Dyke show ended, her career floundered. Then a CBS special she did with Van Dyke scored big in the ratings.
Soon after that impressive win, writer-producer James Brooks seized the moment to persuade the network to offer Moore a show featuring a single woman. She leapt at the chance.
But she didn’t produce it on her own. She’d married Grant Tinker in 1962, and he ran their jointly held MTM Enterprises, a producing powerhouse that at one point had six sitcoms on the air.
That company generated The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-offs, Lou Grant and Rhoda. Was Moore the boss? No, everyone in this documentary acknowledges. She was the face. Tinker was the mastermind.
From The MTM Show’s final episode: Cloris Leachman (l.), Moore (c.) and Valerie Harper (r.)
Her praises are sung in voiceovers and on camera by her castmates and co-workers, as well as by those she influenced, like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Reese Witherspoon, Rosie O'Donnell, Bernadette Peters and Phylicia Rashad.
Yet despite the Moore-Tinker business partnership’s success, their marriage ended in divorce, and as it unraveled, she fell into a chronic drinking habit that would plague her for years to come. No one offers an onscreen comment about either of these calamities.
Mary Richards never faced downturns this deep. Yet Moore herself kept on rising in spite of it all.
She’d tried Broadway in 1966 with the musical Breakfast at Tiffany’s and it flopped badly. But in 1980, with Mary Richards, MTM and Tinker behind her, she triumphantly returned to Broadway in Whose Life Is It Anyway?
She played the lead role of a dying woman entirely in bed, in a hospital gown. She was rewarded with critical praise and a long run.
And her big screen performance in 1980’s Ordinary People earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
So, resilience was always there to be tapped, including in her personal life. She married Dr. Robert Levine in 1983 and her final years under his loving care gave her life a deep tenderness that seemed to be lacking (or absent) before.
Still, we’re left to wonder: What made Moore run, publicly and privately? We never quite learn. This is an assemblage of fine brush strokes, but we don’t get a multi-shaded portrait of the woman or the actress.
I think mainly it’s because there are too many faces, too many voices from Moore’s past crowding the screen as well as the soundtrack.
Levine comes across as a devoted, loving mate, but everyone else feels pretty much like they’ve dropped in on Moore’s life at key points, not actually slugged it out with her over time.
As nearly everyone points out, she could be emotionally distant. She says as much herself. To adjust for this, the documentary’s producers have included televised interviews with her.
David Susskind is appallingly condescending to her work as Laura Petrie, and she pushes back coolly and beautifully against his pomposity.
I think it’s a little unfortunate that they’ve also relied on long passages from an interview late in Moore’s career with Rona Barrett.
Barrett was at the time the premier Hollywood insider columnist and broadcaster who prided herself on asking probing questions to coax stars into telling all.
In this interview’s excerpts, we never see Barrett, so the camera stays in disturbingly tight close up on Moore’s face.
She looks forthcoming, but still seems to be performing. It’s as if Barrett isn’t talking to her so much as putting her on the stand.
Moore ends up sounding more like a cross-examined witness than a survivor, though that’s obviously the strength the documentary producers believed would come across.
But here and elsewhere she feels squeezed more than genuinely opened up.
Yes, it’s interesting to get a look into Moore’s ups and downs, and this documentary has revelations that may be new to many.
I never knew about her problems with alcohol, and I didn’t know how she’d struggled with the death of her son (from a self-inflicted rifle shot that may or may not have been accidental).
Yet her travails and triumphs feel more reported on here than understood.
It may be that throughout her life Moore kept what was most torturous for her, and perhaps what was most quickening and vital, too, almost entirely to herself.
How did she make it, after all? I think we still don’t know.