‘Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story’ Review: Well-Timed Doc Reads Between the Lines of the Late Novelist’s Life
variety.comCatherine Bray “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.
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