Review of Miss You, Love You – Allison Janney’s affecting old-school grief drama | Drama movies

HHollywood is currently in a strange but strangely exciting place, where no one is quite sure what kinds of “movies they don’t make anymore” that they should start making again. We’ve seen period epics like Oppenheimer, sultry thrillers like The Housemaid, and female-led workplace comedies like The Devil Wears Prada 2 all become huge hits, and we’re in the middle of a blockbuster year at the box office, trending toward pre-pandemic totals.

But around the edges or between the cracks, there are collections of films that might once have been brought to light, yet are still left in the dark. A film like Miss You, Love You — a chatty comedy-drama about adults dealing with adult issues — would never have been a smash hit, but it would have occupied a now mostly faded space, a space where niche releases slowly turn strong reviews into good word-of-mouth that allows modest, but impressive, numbers to turn into a sleeper hit with awards buzz. Produced more than two years ago and then released to buyers at Sundance this year, with the help of Julia Roberts, whose husband is a cinematographer, it was eventually purchased by HBO and turned into an early summer TV premiere, where it will likely go down the unfortunate path quietly set by other titles the network has purchased.

Strongly produced and acted films like Bad Education, The Great Lillian Hall, The Tale, and Reality have failed to attract the attention and awards they deserve, and while that’s not the fault of HBO, which at least saved them from a more uncertain fate, it all paints a disappointing picture of where we are now, compared to where we were before. There’s nothing particularly marketable or momentarily sensational about Miss You, Love You, but there’s enough here, from the towering lead performance to the sharp, tight script, to mark it as deserving of more hype than it unfortunately gets.

Although it may seem conventional—a duet that follows a familiar path of strangers overcoming stress to form an emotional bond—there’s also more grit and specificity than one might expect. Diane (Allison Janney) deals with the death of her husband, whom she cared for after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, by making life difficult for anyone brave enough to offer their condolences. With glass forever on hand and an armory of melting stingers, there’s also a certain kind of Janney performance one might expect from this material. The actress, like many hard-working stars with long careers, can often feel as if she’s stuck making an impression of herself, all about eye rolls and outright insults, for which she previously won a somewhat undeserved Oscar for I, Tonya. But there’s a keen self-awareness to the pacing of her performance and the script, on the part of The Descendants co-writer Jim Rash, that gives us recognizable flashes but allows for more depth and darkness than we often see from her, resulting in one of her best roles yet.

Diane reluctantly partners with her son’s loyal assistant and perhaps lover Jimmy (Girls alum Andrew Rannells, who initially struggles to keep up but eventually finds his place), the new focal point of her rage after he arrives to help arrange the funeral. Her son takes an important business trip and may never make it, leaving the couple trying to make their way through an impossible time together.

The revelations are small but poignant as Rush, who also serves as director, keeps things mostly between the two (except for small turns by Bonnie Hunt and Oscar Nunez as scathing representatives of the church that Diane understandably hates) as they struggle to understand each other and their relationship to the invisible man that binds them together. It’s unavoidably theatrical, even with the far-flung cinematic setting of New Mexico, but the smart, prickly writing moves us forward quickly and even when the hazy monologues inevitably come, it mostly avoids cliché and some of them are genuinely moving and heartbreaking (Diane looking back on a difficult night in which she relied on anger while her dying husband stayed in the sun is particularly poignant). Rush’s writing can be a little stilted at times, or too proud of itself, and some of the final-stage arguments border on hyperbole, but there’s enough nuance and vivid detail to make up for that, any mistake being corrected almost immediately by something insightful or challenging that comes right after.

There are difficult issues addressed here, wounds that would often have been ironed out by less curious and emotionally intelligent screenwriters — grief, coming out, infidelity, unrequited love, divorce, caring for a dying person — but we never question Rasch’s authenticity, experience bleeding clearly into his mature, unobtrusive script. Rush forces the duo, and forces us, to sit with difficult, unanswerable questions about how we love and what we expect in return, and I admired his willingness to allow the characters to be selfish or jaded or hypocritical until the end, a finale that is miraculously tear-jerking but lacking in overtly obvious manipulation. Its scope may be small but I found its emotional impact to be surprisingly large.