Diane is a 2019 drama about a woman who fills her days helping others and desperately attempting to bond with her drug-addicted son.
For his feature length film debut, writer/director Ken Jones cuts right to the bone in delivering a deeply personal story that will undoubtedly resonant for many, though by its end will be remembered far more for its heartening lead performance from Mary Kay Place. She stands in the center of a maelstrom of real life so authentic on film, it feels as if we are but voyeurs drawing back a small corner of the curtain, glimpsing a vision of ourselves.
In the rural pastorals of what could be any small town in America, Diane (Place) is an older woman, orbiting a number of crises, diligently efforting – perhaps in futility – to corral family members and friends into better light. Her cousin Donna (Deirdre O’Connell), is dying of cervical cancer, bound to a hospital bed, Donna’s mother expressing a sooner end would be best. Diane’s grown son Brian (Jake Lacy) is in a desperate spiral of drug addiction, refusing help and abusing his mother as she struggles to save him. These two are opposite ends of a seesaw she tries to maintain while working at a soup kitchen with her best friend Bobbie (Andrea Martin), the weight steadily, unmercilessly pulling her into the dark where her past and future lay in wait.
It doesn’t take but a few moments into Diane to understand that Jones isn’t playing by familiar rules, avoiding the larger dramatic set-pieces the script seems designed to inflate for much smaller, impactful punches that allow Mary Kay Place to find a humanity about Diane that feels uncommon in movies like this. The film starts with her asleep, sitting in Donna’s hospital room and you wonder how she could be so insensitive until you soon realize a moment of peace, even in the company of a dying woman, is earned. Pennace harbors in her purpose but there is no rest in the closing shadows of guilt and decline.
What Jones so deftly illustrates is the locality of these people, a tight long-lived community where the young are peripheral, something few films embrace these days, the small town life connected by the winding roads that link them and the stories that shape them. Jones sets Diane in the hollows of a settled winter, metaphorical of where most in his cast exist, leaving Diane to feel somewhat suspended in an uncomfortable space where all things feel unfamiliar yet indescribably near. It’s weirdly ethereal to watch, Jones careful to keep much of where Diane lives unrecognizable and yet instantly identifiable.
We’re never really ready for the ‘next stage’ of life, no matter where we are in it. “When we were kids, we thought we’d live forever,” remarks a minor character in the story, and while that’s of course true, it has a different flavor here as so many around Diane are closing their paths, even as they surely feel closer to the past than their immediate futures.
Diane doesn’t do the expected here, Jones putting his titular character on a smaller but significant journey that isn’t about sweeping acts of redemption and contrived moments of emotional exploitation. Instead, it’s a subtle study by Mary Kay Place that reinvents her already iconic career. She carries the film with gentle lifts of the eye, a slope of the shoulder, a pause that lingers with no words to be said. It’s a genuinely arresting piece of acting that elevates everything about the film, even when it might not strike all the chords we may hope it does. This is one of the best films of the year.