Diane (2019)

Film: Diane (2019)
Stars: Mary Kay Place, Jake Lacy, Phyllis Somerville, Andrea Martin, Estelle Parsons
Director: Kent Jones
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Unlike other sites with mountainous budgets and access to screeners/qualifying runs, I unfortunately am a one-man operation who does this as a side gig, not my full-time occupation.  That results in me having to wait a bit longer before I reveal my look at the best of 2019, even though we have officially entered 2020.  Part of that will be me over the coming weeks catching up on a number of films from 2019 that I meant to see when they were in theaters, but didn't get around to at the time so I'm pushing hard through streaming and Netflix DVD's to get to those pictures.  As a result, you're going to see some eclectic, potentially "late" reviews for a variety of films from 2019 that perhaps you as well were debating seeing, so I'll take the optimistic route that you also are catching up from 2019 and aren't quite ready for a new cinematic year.  If so, one of the movies you might have missed was Kent Jones' Diane, which has won star Mary Kay Place a number of accolades and recently showed up on President Obama's list of his favorite films of 2019.

(Spoilers Ahead) If you follow this blog, you'll know I almost always start with a paragraph recapping the picture, both to ground you in the film we're discussing, but also to establish me in what I felt about the movie (and, quite frankly, I see so many movies this is a way for me to jog my memory in the future if I reference back to this picture).  This doesn't really work for Diane, though.  It's not because the film is some Terrence Malick-style opus, where it's all about feeling and doesn't really have a plot.  Diane very much has a plot, centered around our titular character (played by Place), who lives in rural Massachusetts.  She spends her days surrounded by loved ones, though not in an uncomplicated manner.  Her cousin is ill, her aunts and uncles are aging (it's never fully-established, but it seems probable that her parents died before the film started), and her drug-addicted son Brian (Lacy) is resistant to her urges to help him.  As the film progresses, we see seemingly minor moments in Diane's life that start to add up to her "story."  We witness her son's transformation from a drug addict to a "born again" style Christian with a devout wife, in both circumstances contradictory with Diane's more "routine" faith.  We see the people important to Diane (her cousin, her aunts & uncles, her best friend Bobbie, played by Andrea Martin), fade away, funeral after funeral (taking place over a number of years), with Diane's life becoming more isolated, more questioning of the decisions she's made, more intent on being of service to other people, before ultimately, decades into her story, we find what is presumably the end of Diane's own life, alone in a small house, far away from where the story began.

Diane is not a flashy movie, and it's not a movie that has grand reveals.  The most important "twist" in the plot, the moment that Diane focuses on repeatedly, is a years ago affair she had with her cousin's boyfriend.  Diane is not romantically-involved with anyone throughout the picture, and her husband is long out of her life (there's no allusion to if he also is still alive, but one wonders if he also has passed), and we learn as the film goes on that the people Diane feels she betrayed (her cousin, her son) care less about the event than she does, but Jones captures something special here-the way that in real life, we focus on things that don't seem to matter.  Diane is not a superhero, she's not a villain, she's not even someone that you'd normally think of as a protagonist in a movie, but she's very real.  We all know "Dianes," who focus on making things better for other people, who put others before themselves even though in doing so they're trying to ensure that they have a place at the table.  As a single man in his mid-thirties who finds increasingly that friends and family are people I only see a few times a year but count on for a feeling of purpose, Diane's story hits a bit closer to home than I'd normally be willing to admit.

But perhaps that's also because Place makes her character at once specific and universal.  Her Diane is a unique creation, the sort of person that in another movie would be relegated to a side scene or just sitting at the dining room table arbitrating our main heroine's problems, but here is fleshed out and seen.  And yet, she also makes sure that you can see yourself in her character, in this story about the fragility of our lives, how we count on others to make us feel needed.  There are problems in Jones' script (the 60-year-old Jones is making his first narrative feature here after decades as a film critic)-the late-in-film fantasy where Diane gets high with a younger man feels indulgent, as does the movie's final act which didn't need to happen for us to understand how Diane's story would end, but the quiet moments he finds in this character are really special.  Place, after decades of supporting work in film (Private Benjamin, The Big Chill), and television (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) gets center stage and nails the performance.  Her Diane is so deeply felt, so bereft of cliche, you leave wondering why Place hadn't been afforded lead roles her whole career.  Diane is the kind of film it's easy to gloss over when you're looking through your movie queue, but impossible to forget if you take the time to click the button.