Reviewed by Judy Garrison

What a treat to find this documentary on Netflix! I had religiously read her syndicated column (in The New York Times?) in the early aughts, delighted to find someone who could make me laugh out loud over incompetence and corruption. Raised in a Houston suburb, Molly rebelled against her conservative and affluent upbringing. She graduated from Smith College in 1966, spending her junior year studying at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris, earning a degree in 1967 from Columbia School of Journalism. Referred to somewhere as this “six feet of Texas trouble whose acerbic wit left both sides of the aisle laughing,” Molly Ivins emerged into the world of journalism as I’d wager the only woman in the country capable of speaking out fearlessly and taking her place in the exclusively white male newsrooms of the day. (A woman who could manage to get hired was regularly confined to write for the social pages.) Armed with that degree, an outsize intelligence and a singular ability to emit colorful and devastating critiques of legislators and their policies, most pointedly of Texans, she herself was always a devoted Texan. She delivered these informed salvos in rapid-fire oral and written bursts, all the while bearing a winning smile. Molly was a fitting vanguard of womanhood propelling into journalism; the less irreverent and more refined would follow soon on the path she’d blasted.

Her early career started at the Houston Chronicle, but motivated to move outside of Texas Molly soon found employment at The Minneapolis Tribune as the first woman police reporter, her height and bluster no doubt helping her to both qualify and succeed. During the 1970s she chronicled the political antics of the Texas legislature, which she referred to as “a national laboratory for bad government,” while writing for The Texas Observer, an independent political journal. Somehow, she managed to personally ingratiate herself across the political spectrum, even with the good ol’ boys she targeted. And she could be rough on Democrats, too. She was particularly disgusted by Bill Clinton’s welfare reform. Dubbed by some a leftist-radical, Molly described her own stance: “I don’t have a program…I guess I’m a left-libertarian and a populist and I believe in the Bill of Rights the way some folks believe in the Bible.”

  Molly worked at The New York Times from 1976-1982, the latter years as Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief, when she was let know—after suffering absurd re-editing of her folksy speech—that she didn’t fit in. Back to Texas she went, to write for the Dallas Times Herald. Her bestseller: Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, one of her 5 most popular books, was published in 2000. She became a passionate critic of the 2003 Iraq war. Still, I spotted somewhere a lovely memorial quote to her by Dubya.

Throughout the documentary we are treated to footage of Molly over the decades delivering her badass aphorisms, as well as tributes by Rachel Maddow and Dan Rather, and commentary from her brother and sister. Molly died too soon—from breast cancer at the age of 62 in early 2007, by then acknowledging and rueing her long history of alcohol abuse. Her quotations, and their effect, however, will live on:

  “So keep fightin’ –for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. ‘Cause you don’t always win.”

Here’s another: “We’ve had trickle-down economics in the country for ten years now, and most of us aren’t even damp yet.”

Hope this sampling encourages you to watch Raise Hell, an account of how adeptly and brilliantly this firebrand of a woman used her satire as a weapon of the powerless against the corrupt and powerful.~