I like her film characters better than I like Olympia herself, it turns out. She comes across as pretty brash here, but ultimately one comes away with the sense that she was a very deep person, who has the same shortcomings and fears that so many do, which makes her quite relatable. But on the flipside, for a more conservative person like myself, she comes across as someone who would look down her nose at my values and consider me uptight. It takes all kinds, though, and watching this was like hanging out with her, which was something I never got to do until now. Pretty cool.
On another note, she and Joan Jett were in a movie together, though they never shared a scene. The movie was called "big driver" for the lifetime television network. And after seeing the documentary, I felt like Olympia could've been a mentor to Joan. She was old enough to be Joan Jett's mother, and she definitely shares a lot of Joan Jett philosophy about life. Though, Joan comes across as a little softer, which makes her less of a sort of culture shock to someone like me - but the fact is, Joan and Olympia shared a similar spirituality. In fact, it was after discovering that Olympia Dukakis was into the Advaita Vedanta branch of Hinduism, that I decided to watch this right away! As it turns out, that's the exact branch Joan Jett was talking about in one of her interviews, but I didn't that's what she was saying, until I saw the word spelled out in Olympia's Wikipedia page - and then it dawned on me that Joan had been talking about that. So, Olympia and Joan are like two sides of the same coin, except Joan is the softer side. Joan is the shy, soft spoken one, whereas Olympia is the loud, more aggressive, one. But on an intellectual level, they are on the same page, more or less. However, they both arrived at that page differently, I think. Joan had always been a seeker and had delved in and out of several spiritual schools of thought. Olympia, by contrast, had stumbled into that spirituality quite by happenstance, it seemed from the documentary.
Anyway, very interesting - and very unexpected.
