Mark Reviews Movies: DIANE (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 11, 2019

We don't know whether to sympathize with Diane (Mary Kay Place), because her life is an increasingly lonely mess, or to pity her, because she seems incapable of finding a way out of her troubles. At a certain point in writer/director Kent Jones' Diane, we might even believe that she deserves what's she's getting out of her life, because that loneliness is the inevitable result of someone who behaves in some of the ways that Diane does here.

Jones, a film critic-turned-filmmaker making his narrative debut, observes the day-to-day routine and struggles of Diane with a heightened sense of focus and only a few frills. On the latter end, there is at least one dream sequence near the end the story. There's another scene shortly after the obvious dream that might be one as well, although Jones is only able to suggest that possibility because we've come to know this character so well.

As the second or third and ultimate narrative gimmick, the final scene leaps forward in time by an unknown number of years, finding Diane at the culmination of a life lived in various states of isolation. It's the only logical conclusion to this story, which treats time as a gradually and then quickly diminishing commodity.

The rest of the film, though, sees Diane's life as it is in the moment, when there seems to be a least enough time to do something about one's own life, one's relationship with others, and one's place in the world. She lives in a nice, multi-room home by herself. It was once the kind of place where a full family would have lived, but now, there are only some remnants of the lives of people other than Diane to be found. She starts her day with a to-do list and, then, spends the rest of the day doing those things.

They're not overly significant things, and Jones only cares about the details of the list in that it gives Diane a purpose—and, more importantly, that she feels the need to establish a purpose for herself. Some of her day is spent with family and friends like Bobbie (Andrea Martin), who complains about the manners of the kids these days, or occasionally volunteering at a local homeless shelter.

At the story's start, though, there are two situations that are in need of routine attention. One is that her cousin Donna (Deirdre O'Connell) is dying a slow and painful death of cervical cancer in the hospital. The other is her son Brian (Jake Lacy), who lives in a nearby apartment and has had a history of drug addiction.

Death is very much on the minds of Diane and, hence, the film itself. There comes a certain point in everyone's life when one has fewer family members, and then there comes a time when one's own peers—friends and relatives of a similar generation—start to go, too. Donna marks a certain transitional period for Diane, who has seen the deaths of her parents and all but one of her aunts, but here is an entirely different realization about mortality and the fleeting nature of time.

Diane doesn't need to speak of this looming sense of doom, because it's inherent to how often the subject of death comes up in Jones' screenplay. More importantly, when the subject does arise, it's either talked around, noting how many people seem to be getting sick or having surgeries and looking at the diminishing state of a family, or discussed with blunt pronouncements to end the conversation—lest anyone really talk about what it feels like to see everyone dying and to know that one's own time will be here sooner rather later. That's how people actually handle the topic, and the film is attuned to that underlying sense of fear and regret that we don't need the characters to say any more.

The other thing that people are prone to do is to latch on to the things and the people who do remain. That's Diane's coping mechanism, not only for less but also for deep-seated guilt about a decision she made a long time ago, but in her mind, it's also a matter of vital importance.

After a temporary stay at a rehabilitation facility, Brian appears to have returned to his addiction. His mother visits his apartment every day, as far as we can tell from the way that Jones and editor Mike Selemon piece together the fragments of routine in Diane's life. Of the assorted relationships within the story, the one between Diane and Brian is of utmost priority. They argue frequently—Brian because he wants to be left alone and Diane because she suspects that he has gone back to using drugs. The son tells his mother that he needs to recover on his own, but Diane keeps returning.

The major question of her repeated returns, against her son's wishes and even the advice of her friends and family members, comes down to her motive. There are a few possibilities, and even though Jones never has Diane explicitly state anything, each of them is so likely that it's probably a combination of them. The most obvious one is that she fears her son will die. We have to believe the sincerity of that fear.

What's fascinating here—and it gets to the heart of just how complex Diane is as a character—is how things change and don't change once Brian, the addict, is out of the picture, only to be replaced by a Brian who clearly has turned his life around in the way that his mother so desperately wanted. Even then, the view of the son in front of her isn't what she actually wants. At that point, we have to wonder if this is about Brian and his life or if it's simply about Diane's need to have some form of control over a world that seems to spiraling toward doom.

The portrait we get is of a lonely, judgmental, remorseful, and helpless woman, played with concentrated restraint and a sense of fearless honesty by Place. However one may feel about the character at various points throughout Diane, there's little denying that we understand the inner workings of the eponymous character about as well as we can hope to understand a character in a film.

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