Diane (2018, Kent Jones) (Patreon)

54/100

What a drag it is getting old. (Twang twang twang, twang twang twang.) Mary Kay Place does predictably excellent work in the title role, emphasizing Diane's prickliness and sheer exhaustion even as all the supporting characters sing her virtues; my favorite moment in the film might be the way she angrily mutters "Can't find my son" as she walks toward the hospital exit, still railing at a well-meaning nurse who's now out of earshot. But writer-director Kent Jones (with whom I have a nodding acquaintance, though we've never exchanged more than a few words), making his first narrative feature, aims for Lonergan-style complexity and expansiveness without yet having the chops (as a writer, anyway) to pull off that degree of difficulty. This is especially evident in Diane's relationship with her aforementioned son (Jake Lacy, a very demonstrative actor to whom I've never quite warmed; he's my least favorite part of Carol), which finally extracts itself from coping-with-an-addict clichés only to dive headlong into coping-with-a-born-again-nutjob clichés. Neither dynamic feels false, exactly, but both lack the specificity and texture that would transcend obviousness. Jones instead locates those elements primarily in Diane's circle of family and friends, who are always there for her right up until the moment when they suddenly drop dead. The inevitable horror of seeing your world gradually shrink as the end approaches is a great, little-explored subject to which Diane doesn't really do justice, because it can only be addressed obliquely and that demands a suitably compelling/distracting foreground. Only a couple of scenes—Diane's final conversation with Donna (a superbly acerbic Deirdre O'Connell) on the latter's deathbed; the drunken mother-son rapprochement—achieve real dramatic liftoff. The rest feel of a piece with Jeremiah Bornfield's pushy score, which sounds like Brian Eno's Music for Funeral Homes.