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Movie Review: ‘Diane’

April 5, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Mary Kay Place, 71, gets the role of a lifetime in Diane, the engine of New York Film Festival director Kent Jones’ character-driven, Martin Scorsese-produced study of a woman who has become a supporting player in her own existence. It’s a bold choice in contemporary American films, to put a postmenopausal woman on the verge of a polite nervous breakdown at a downbeat drama’s center. Because Place, best known as the single businesswoman desperate to conceive in The Big Chill, has such a warm and genuine touch, Diane’s story is one of late-day awakening rather than one long stretch of kvetch.

The script meanders through a series of modestly dramatic events as Diane drives her battered sedan from one errand to the next through frigid, rural wooded Massachusetts. The roughest comes when she visits her only son, Brian (Jake Lacy). She totes his laundry to his chilly crash pad. When he shambles out of the bedroom, he’s equally unkempt and resents his mother’s “helpful” intrusion.

Brian’s an addict, and she scans him with her gimlet eye, trying to assess if he’s using again or just tired. It’s so hard to be a mother helpless to heal her once-beautiful child. It’s clear, through script and direction, that this is a dance they’ve been doing for ages, long after Brian should have taken control of his own life. “Take a shower and get cleaned up,” she nags in frustration. The ruts in their relationship — the hopes and disappointments of a mother who has seen her beloved son relapse, and who sees before her both the boy and the cracked man he has become — are heartbreakingly rendered.

Add another wrinkle to Diane’s face.

[Click here to see my AARP interview: ‘Mary Kay Place Gets Her First Lead Role’]

The do-gooder continues on her circuit: delivering casseroles to neighbors experiencing rough times, heading to the soup kitchen to ladle stew for the less fortunate, and visiting her terminally ill cousin Donna (the incandescent Deirdre O’Connell, 67) at the hospital. The pair radiate a long, comfortable kinship that transcends blood.

Diane and Donna have spent their lives sitting across from each other, playing cards, kibitzing and advising — and avoiding addressing a personal betrayal perpetrated by Diane that continues to gnaw at her. Diane is good — warm, caring, community-spirited. But she’s not as good as she might have been if she hadn’t made one big mistake she has regretted all of her life.

Watching Donna wane, along with their close-knit family’s elders, Diane belatedly realizes that all the consoling of others will not heal what’s cracked within her. Diane gets trashed at a bar for locals. She boogies down and, seemingly, rekindles the spark that she has lost, the joy in the moment. It has been a long time since she has loved herself, if she ever did, and there’s a glimmer of hope. There’s still time for Diane to star in the movie of her life.

[This review originally appear on AARP]

Filed Under: Movies & TV Tagged With: aarp, Aging, best actress, Diane, Kent Jones, Martin Scorsese, Movie, movie reviews, Tribeca Film Festival

BBC Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Espied

September 16, 2011 By Thelma 1 Comment

tinker tailor soldier spy, John LeCarre,Oscar,Gary Oldman,BBC

Guinness in a bowler hat nod to Magritte

The movie version of John Le Carre’s deeply twisted spy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy will premiere in the U.S. on December 9th. It’s already garnering early Oscar buzz for Gary Oldman in the Alec Guinness role of George Smiley, and Colin Firth stepping into Ian Richardson‘s polished brogues as Bill Haydon.

Last night, I intended to watch the first installment of the 1979 seven-part BBC series with my husband — starting with “Flushing out the Mole.”  It was like eating Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies. We couldn’t consume just one, but we stopped at two so that tonight we could return and hopefully make it last at least until Saturday.

My husband and I are part of a small but proud minority who are addicted to BBC mysteries. Give us Inspector Lewis, Poirot, Miss Marple, the new Sherlock Holmes, Midsomer Murders, Rebus, and we are at peace, sheltered from our earthly cares. The three cats cluster around us on the couch, purring. My hand snakes out to find my husband’s. We do not get up, and down, and answer the phone, or attend to the children’s interruptions, because we’re both riveted to the sofa: ah, BBC mysteries.

We have both read LeCarre’s novel — my husband rereading it recently. And, still, it takes an act of faith to watch the mini-series and trust in Le Carre, aware that we will be baffled anew by the complicated, Cold War intrigue of internal politics within the British secret service and the existence of a mole at the highest echelons of MI6.

And, so, the early response to the Hollywood movie from Focus Feature that it is confusing confounds me. Isn’t that the point? To be sucked into a world where nothing is at it seems, where men in proper ties and overcoats are ultimately as unknowable and surreal as figures in a Magritte landscape? I will see the film at an early press screening the week after next, and report back. But the misdirection and perplexity is precisely the point: this is not James Bond,  flamboyant actions at a casino and flashy blonds with funny names. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is the antithesis of the children’s nursery rhyme from which it derives its name: this is an intellectual puzzle. Le Carrre is the chessmaster. You may work out bits, you will surely be delighted in the moment, but the ending should come as a kick in the head.

(the entire series is available from Acorn, $49.99; the sequel, Smiley’s People, is also available.)

Filed Under: Books, Criticism, Movies & TV Tagged With: Acorn, Alec Guinness, BBC seven-part TV series, Cold War, Colin Firth, Espionage Thriller, Gary Oldman, Ian Richardson, MI6, Movie, mystery, Oscars, Soldier, Spy, Tailor, Tinker

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