Written and directed by Paul Wagner, exploring the life and art of the most important woman artist of the 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe, who became famous for her paintings of flowers and emerged as an iconic role model for women. With Claire Danes as the voice of O’Keeffe and narrated by Hugh Dancy.
Undoubtedly, the power couple that is Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy was always going to be a great choice for Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light. They both have such emotive, calming and charming voices. While Dancy keeps things light with his role as narrator, adding an endearing, curious note, Danes gets to inject a little more emotion. She captures the determination, eagerness and unique perspective of the artist, without overstepping her bounds. Making sure that the feeling is there but not trying to turn it into a more overt performance or interpretation, she keeps things on a serene, almost poetic level.
Outside of that, the style is pretty much straight down the line, simple and traditional, for a documentary of this type. It’s nothing fancy but it has a definite warmth to it and the tone is unwaveringly in admiration of O’Keeffe. There’s some decent editing work mixed in there and there’s a good amount of time spent highlight the actual work rather than simply talking about the artist. It’s also relatively thorough on O’Keeffe’s journey, coming in at just under two hours, it does traverse decades of her life to give you the bigger picture of her environments and influences.
However, it can feel slow and at times like you’re hearing the same opinion or story told by multiple experts. While there isn’t really much controversy to the artist, other than the sexual interpretation of her work, and her later in life companion, it still would have been nice to see the experts provide different perspectives rather than echo each other’s view. That similarly slows things down, so the pacing could use a bit more energy.
Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light is a loving homage to the artist. It consistently sings her praises while walking you through many key moments in her life, portraying what shaped her as an artist. It’s interesting and covers a great deal of her experiences, so if you know nothing going in, this will give you a fantastic introduction. It simply feels like it slows itself down too much, it’s stylistically very simple, not quite embracing O’Keeffe’s love of colour into its persona and the runtime comes in a little long. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting documentary and does a good job of highlighting the importance of O’Keeffe’s work and achievements.
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