Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power (2019)

(On TV, May 2020) Ask any literate Canadian, and they will tell you: Margaret Atwood is a national treasure, so precious that we’re going to preserve her for centuries in special places (libraries, that is). Accordingly, we had to have a documentary about her life and career, although it’s kind of gobsmacking to see much of Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power filtered through the success of The Handmaid’s Tale TV show as a kind of social proof. Still, it’s hagiography that gives a lot of space to Atwood, and deservedly so given how she can be witty, smart, funny, honest and compelling all at once. A generous use of archival photos and material bulks up the film, along with celebrity testimonies and Atwood herself going through her current career. Quite ironically, it shows Atwood as a feminist/speculative writer, which is a nice (and not shameful) turn considering some of her previous declarations, now recanted, about how she wasn’t really a Science Fiction writer. (She is an SF writer, just not a “genre” SF writer—she was, as not reported in this documentary, a voracious Science Fiction reader when younger.) Is it completely uncritical of its subject? Obviously. Is Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power still worth watching? Of course, because Atwood is as close to a beloved public intellectual as Canada has produced recently.