Everyday Saint

Diane a film by Kent Jones.  With Mary Kay Place, Jake Lacy, Estelle Parsons, Andrea Martin ****

I’ve seen gritty working class movies before, but never seen a scene quite like one in Diane, where family members and friends are gathered around a small greasy table in a tiny kitchen, and people are drinking soda or coffee or smoking cigarettes and talking, some not even sitting, because there aren’t enough chairs.  There’s no particular point to the conversation, except that someone asks Diane (Mary Kay Place) how her son Brian is doing and there’s a long pause where she looks chagrined, says something like “All right.”  Then somebody says “Who’s staying for dinner?”  People are actually staying at this tiny table for a meal.  Diane herself is staying.  How someone will cook get the food together I don’t know.

I’ve always thought that scenes of a car driving from place to place are the mark of a Grade B movie, but in Diane, as we see her car relentlessly travel the two-lane roads of rural Massachusetts, we get a feeling for how wearing the travel is, how drab the landscape, how difficult the lives.  Diane spends her life helping people, visiting an ailing cousin in the hospital, taking casseroles to another family member, working in a soup kitchen, and—most frustratingly of all—looking after Brian (Jake Lacy), who is a recovering addict.

The prescription for dealing with an addict is to leave him alone and let him hit bottom, as Diane’s friend Bobbie (Andrea Martin), reminds her, but Diane can’t do that, because this is her child.  She can’t help checking on him every day, taking groceries and doing his laundry, getting in arguments, and when he disappears for a period of time, she’s frantic.

Diane would seem—despite the occasional blow-up—to be a saint, except that we discover she’s concealing a “terrible sin,” at least that’s how she refers to it in her journal (this is a movie—talk about throwbacks—in which which we actually see the protagonist writing longhand in a journal.  We watch the words appear on the page).  It’s related to the cousin whom she visits in the hospital, who has forgiven her but not forgotten (a fine distinction in this case).  There is a great deal we don’t know about her life: when her husband (apparently) died (he definitely isn’t around), if he was around when she committed her sin, how long this sinful period lasted.  But somehow it’s fine not to know.  Diane is a troubled older woman.  She lives in a world of women, where most of the men are gone.  She takes care of people, and people take care of her.  And she’s worried to death about her son.

The funniest and most human scene—in a movie that doesn’t have a whole lot of humor—is when Diane, finally exhausted by all her helping, goes out by herself to have a drink, at a crummy run-down place where she was once a regular (hinting at a troubled past).  She orders a Margarita and “some of those crackers you used to have,” puts some money in the juke box, and takes a drunken trip down memory lane, where she sings along with old songs and actually gets up to dance.  She’s not just the frumpy old lady in a bar; she’s the embarrassing drunk.

When they finally turn down her request for another drink and send her out, we’re terrified she might actually drive home, over those narrow roads we’ve been seeing for the whole film.  And then—we’d seen the bartender making a phone call—her family comes to the rescue, just as she was wailing pitifully in the parking lot.  Nobody judges her or particularly cares.  They just get her home.

This, then, is a movie about working class women taking care of each other.  The matriarch is a woman named Mary (Estelle Parsons), mother of the dying cousin who has a grudge against Diane, and they’re a feisty and tight-knit group.  Brian undergoes a surprising conversion toward the end—though in a way it seems likely for his extreme personality—and there are some other scenes I found puzzling, including one of heroin use that was a real stunner (my wife thought it was a dream).  But there’s a wonderful final scene between Brian and Diane which doesn’t tie up all the loose ends, but is emotionally satisfying.  By the closing credits we feel we’ve seen the arc of a life.

Diane is not—as my wife said when we walked out—the feel good movie of the year, and it’s not always pleasant to watch.  But it is a work of art, about a group of people who rarely seem to get noticed in Hollywood or anywhere else.  And that—in a multiplex where every other movie seemed to be about a comic book hero or a flying elephant—is enough.