'Great Photo, Lovely Life' Is Brutal and Important Storytelling

By Alison Lanier | Film | December 26, 2023 |

By Alison Lanier | Film | December 26, 2023 |

I’ve said over and over again that true crime is a messy and exploitative genre. It’s a form of shock-value storytelling that thrives on squeezing out horrific details of real people’s experiences without actually dwelling on the harm done in any genuine or meaningful way. There’s a cathartic ease to this kind of story—we’re seeing the revelation of facts laid bare and feeling all the outrage that the killer/con/abuse should have received from the get-go. Sometimes, we even get to feel extra morally superior to lax law enforcement or corrupt power structures because, from our enlightened viewpoint via our TV screen, we see them for what they really are—or at least what the crime show du jour wants them to be.

This was why Max’s new documentary Great Photo, Lovely Life was such a powerful surprise when I flicked over to it, thinking it was just another glossy true crime entry in HBO’s catalog.

Great Photo, Lovely Life, from photojournalist Amanda Mustard and cinematographer Rachel Beth Anderson, is the brutally personal story of Amanda’s own family. (Because there are so many Mustard family members in this mix, I’ll call Amanda by her first name for clarity.)

Amanda sets out on a harrowing and winding process to document and hold to the light the many horrific crimes of her grandfather, Bill Flickinger. Flickinger was a pedophile who, in his professional life as a chiropractor and in his personal life as a father and grandfather, abused an untold number of young girls. Among his victims were Amanda’s mother, Debi, and Amanda’s older sister, Angie. Needless to say, the horror of looking directly at this man and what he’s done, as well as wrestling with the family ties of blood and history between the generations, is immense.

The project is part pure research, documenting of a sprawling story of abuse which had been buried in silence and shame for decades. But the other part of it, the direct and stunning process of reckoning, is what really sets this documentary apart.

Amanda’s mission is explicitly one of healing: she and her mother do the unthinkably difficult work of reaching out to Flickinger’s victims—at least those that they can find—and bringing the pieces together. Amanda herself is also a survivor of sexual assault, though not Flickinger’s. She’s haunted by the deep wound left not only by the attack but by the lack of acknowledgement that anything wrong had happened. That’s what she was hunting for in her own journey toward peace: acknowledgement. She’s on a mission now to get her grandfather to acknowledge the harm he’s done, to recognize the pain he caused in the lives of so many people.

Because Flickinger, as Amanda undertakes this project, is very much alive and talkative, and he’s not extremely secretive about his sexual assault on young girls—except in his recounting, they were all onboard and “liked” it. Even as he’s telling Amanda and Debi how he abused Debi while giving her a bath as a small child, he says that she enjoyed it. It’s a level of delusion and denial that seems truly impossible to shatter.

But that’s the project: to gather the words of the survivors and make him hear and acknowledge them before he dies. To make it so that he can’t look away. And Amanda undertakes that mission with a calm grace and steel spine that is seriously stunning to behold. Every interview in this documentary is a massive feat of bravery.

It’s also an exercise in the possibility and nature of healing, and what healing means for different people facing a complicated and unspeakable pain. Angie harbors a deep hurt toward her mother for placing her in a situation that led to Angie’s abuse. Debi, meanwhile, isn’t able to hear that through the pain of reopened wounds and the myriad levels of betrayal she perceives around her. One of Flickinger’s victims, while visiting the chiropractic clinic where Flickinger abused her, speaks with the doctors there now who insist that she offer Flickinger Christian forgiveness—that forgiveness is the only way toward healing—and proceed to draw her and Amanda into a truly awkward prayer circle.

This is a documentary project that’s setting out to ask questions rather than pretending to be able to answer them or draw easy morals or emotional catharsis. It’s the difficult work of true crime, dwelling with the harm done and reckoning with it in a way that is patient and non-superficial.

And, on an entirely separate point, Great Photo, Lovely Life is a beautifully shot and constructed documentary. Between Amanda’s photojournalistic eye and Anderson’s cinematography, there’s a visual sensibility about the documentary’s presentation that is just stunning.

Great Photo, Lovely Life is streaming on Max.