Review: A filmmaker confronts her pedophile grandfather in the HBO documentary ‘Great Photo, Lovely Life’

Early in the HBO documentary “Great Photo, Lovely Life,” filmmaker and photojournalist Amanda Mustard says she always knew her grandfather was “creepy” and that “some things happened.” But she didn’t know the details of his pedophilia. “And now that I’m looking closer and finding concrete rape charges that he managed to kind of weasel out of, it’s just scratching the surface. I just need to keep looking. Maybe I can hold him accountable.”

Her extraordinary film is subtitled “Facing a Family’s Secrets,” and that’s what she’s after. Her grandfather is William Flickinger, a retired chiropractor she interviews before his death — as well as others including her mother, who was both victim and enabler — to get at the truth.

In his assisted living community, everyone comments on what a nice person Flickinger is. Then a woman stops by their table. “I hope you are being a good boy,” she jokes. But there’s an edge to their exchange. Maybe it’s not a joke. When she walks away, Flickinger mutters sourly, “That one has a mouth.”

Later, Mustard sits down with him in his apartment and says: “Can I ask you a few questions?”

“Of course, honey,” he says gently. Affectionately. “Don’t you hesitate for anything.”

The dichotomy illustrates these two sides of Flickinger, who is surprisingly forthcoming about his crimes when he talks about them in the abstract. “It seemed like some of these little girls, for example, were almost throwing themselves at me,” he tells Mustard. “Now that might sound a little stupid. But they wanted to learn things.”

Asked about a specific child, he says: “We had quite an engagement, so to speak. And we were very close, sexually, even though she was little. And she loved it.” He also casually admits to molesting Mustard’s mother Debi in the bathtub when she was five. “She just loved it.”

This admission is news to Debi, who says her earliest memory is being seven or eight years old, and “all I remember is me laying face down on one of his chiropractic adjustment tables and I felt him doing something on my back. And I realized that it was his penis. And he was rubbing it on my back.”

Codirected with Rachel Beth Anderson, the film is the kind of highly personal and bracing project that you rarely encounter on streaming platforms these days, where the term “documentary” has come to mean something much cheaper and reductive.

Looking through old photos, Mustard stares at a family portrait. “Great photo, lovely life” is written on the back, as if someone were hoping to will this falsehood into reality.

Mustard has real and understandable anger and the film functions as one way for her to process some of that and combat her family’s silence. You root for her, that she can muster an approach that puts him against the ropes and never lets up. That’s not how it goes, because confrontation in person is harder than she anticipated. Mustard struggles with her composure at points. There’s so much fumbling here, which is what makes it so human and messy. Instead of calmly and firmly pressing him, Mustard dances around the terminology. At one point, she breaks down in tears, unable to deliver messages from his victims.

Here’s Debi talking about her own mother, Flickinger’s wife: “My mom’s life was like one of those crystals that you can hang in the sun and you see different facets. A lot of it is a mystery. And the few times that I did ask her to tell me the truth about things, like my past or my dad or whatever, she just got angry with me and said, ‘There’s no use in bringing up the past because it’s not going to change what happened.’ She knew so much more than what she ever expressed because she wasn’t allowed to express it.”

Flickinger’s profession meant he could prey on his child clients. Each time he was found out — and he was in several instances — he would move out of state and start over. His wife enabled this, which complicates the story even further because it appears she was, at the very least, trapped in a psychologically abusive marriage to a highly controlling man.

His destructive effect was multigenerational. Debi married young. But her husband was abusive, so she moved back in with her parents, along with her first born, then a little girl who is Mustard’s older sister.

For much of the film, Debi is in denial and reluctant to acknowledge her role in putting her child in close proximity to a man who would abuse her. Debi claims her mother promised to make sure nothing happened. Why would she trust her mother in light of her own experiences?

The beauty of the film is that it doesn’t ask you to judge Debi or her mother, so much as to reckon with their complicity, which is fraught and messy and infuriating and tragic all at once. Mustard is trying to find a way to name it and acknowledge it — and reduce its stranglehold on everyone. Flickinger’s refusal to apologize is one last indignity for his victims, who just want their trauma validated.

Late in the film, Mustard’s sister records a message for Flickinger.

“Grandpa, I want to start off by telling you I love you dearly and I’m thankful to have you as my grandpa.” What an unexpected way to begin.

And then: “I suffered many years of my life by the trauma I endured as a child in moving into your home with my mom, where I was subject to sexual abuse for many years at your hand.”

The cognitive dissonance is difficult to reconcile. Family relationships are tricky and tangled and full of mixed emotions, no matter how justified the anger.

“Great Photo, Lovely Life: Facing a Family’s Secrets” — 4 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: 9 p.m. Tuesday on HBO (streaming on Max)

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic

nmetz@chicagotribune.com