Diane

'Diane', a character-driven study of a woman coming to grips with her past life choices, aging, loss of friends and family, and most importantly, her ongoing struggle to relate to her drug-addicted son, ws featured at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Mary Kay Place (remember her from the TV series 'Mary Hartman Mary Hartman', or movies 'Being John Malkovich' and 'The Big Chill'?), is quite good as the title character and is in virtually every seen of the movie, which, according to director Kent Jones in a post-viewing Q&A, was filmed in 20 days and has won Best Narrative at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Diane spends the movie always reaching out to others with a helping hand but just cannot seem to grasp the idea that she needs, via those that she helps, to focus inward at times and be at peace with herself and her choices. It is a very interesting movie with several great performances, but at times leaves the viewer scratching their head about timeline, certain images, and seemingly non-congruent scenes, but overall a very good study of a flawed human. By the way...the name Diane is derived from Diana, goddess of the hunt, childbirth, and the forest-very appropriate for the movie's character.

DIANE is an very realistically observed, emotionally nuanced drama of sixty-something Boomer women living in small-town up-upstate New York, Western Massachusetts, or thereabouts, and centered around an Oscar calibre performance by Mary Kay Place. Although the viewer may be captivated by the spell of the film's flow of personal and interpersonal detail, a thematic core may be abstracted from it; and some nice formal flourishes enrich the film. Thematically, the film illuminates the individual and group altruism of its world of Sixtyish Boomer women, a kind of unspoken sisterhood of social nurture. Formally, the emotional density of its many micro dramas is periodically offset by lovely scenes of calm country highway driving. Commercially, one fears that the film may suffer from a lack of conventional "hooks," but it's appeal -- word of it accurately and well spread -- should be intense for the sizable audience of Boomer women, not to mention alert demographically diverse cinophiles.

For me, there's a limited appeal to a movie such as "Diane," which so authentically represents the life of an ordinary woman. Nothing extraordinary happens. She visits the same places and the same people over and over again, almost always either talking about her health and relationship problems or those of others in her circle. If they run out of current shortcomings to discuss, they dredge up past ones. Repeated use of the same camera positions for the same spaces reinforces this repetitive circling, too. When Diane is looking for her drug-addled son again, for instance, the camera again frames her through a doorway from the kitchen. There's a telling scene, where one of Diane's friends searches her mind for another topic to discuss when Diane refuses to talk about her son temporarily. Eventually, they share recollections of the food of the restaurants that have occupied the space they're currently in. It's one of the few moments in the movie when they're not gossiping over their clique.

Mary Kay Place is fine in the titular role, which garnered her some talk of an Oscar nomination that never came, but "Diane" is largely an inversion of the usual parts given to such a character actor--making a protagonist of the mother in a drug-addiction drama, or of the friend in another drama about a cancer patient, etc. I appreciate that the filmmakers didn't resort to the usual introduction of a new romance to alleviate this dullness, though. Indeed, her past extramarital affair is largely glossed over in a sort of anti-climax. Besides, Diane's life is already overfilled with interpersonal relationships. The one somewhat interesting activity she manages to do alone, for she can't even drink by herself for long before her friends show up to take her home, is writing in her diary. It's a pastime that stands in stark contrast to the rest of the routine of this highly interdependent character. There's little to write about, either, besides everyone getting sick and eventually dying. Sure, it's respectably true to life, but it can be bad enough to already be living some variation of this narrative; to see it on the screen, may make such quiet desperation worse.

Unusual movie, it's like you meet a stranger (woman) and she let you know of the kind of (tough) life is is having at the moment. Quite well done, but the movie ends unexpectedly!

The wonderful thing about this film is that it did not feel over-acted. Not for one second.