Mary Tyler Moore is an American icon and an international star. A legendary name on American TV, he shone in cinema and theater, but he always kept a certain mystery about who “really” was the person, not the artist who inspired generations. The documentary Being Mary Tyler Moore tries to decipher the riddle. It doesn’t quite hit the target…

With a career that spanned six decades, Mary embodied the “perfect American”: pretty without being unreachable; smart but able to be innocent and independent yet romantic. Because she starred in two legendary sitcoms like The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977), where she played an unsubmissive wife in one and a divorced woman in the other, many points to her. as a feminist icon, but although she was modern, she didn’t embrace the cause. With no less than seven Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and an Oscar nomination for Ordinary People, she was an advocate for animal rights, vegetarianism, and diabetes prevention (of which she was a victim).

Born in New York in 1936, Mary studied ballet and always wanted to be an artist, with family support. He was always “lucky” and his career encountered very few problems and was generally accepted by the public and colleagues. Behind the scenes, he kept tragic personal dramas: his mother’s alcoholism, the suspicious death of his sister (apparent suicide), the death of his brother at a young age due to cancer, and the also suspicious death of his son, in 1980, due to an ‘accident with a weapon’. Diabetic and alcoholic, Mary went through three marriages and two divorces, without ever sharing what happened in those relationships. Being Mary Tyler Moore doesn’t shed anything new on the issues either.

The big problem with the memory of Mary Tyler Moore and her undeniable contribution to modernizing the female figure in American culture lay in her personal conservatism, kind of like an American version of Brazilian star Regina Duarte, but with less political discourse. And that yes, the documentary clarifies, even if carefully.

Mary passed away at the age of 80, in January 2017, almost blind, due to complications related to diabetes she had had since 1969, with cardiopulmonary arrest complicated by pneumonia. For generations that didn’t know her, it’s worth the curiosity. For the fans, to try to decipher it. Even because, with the cultural advance, Mary can be rewritten into oblivion, her complexity continues to enchant us.

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