Nine months ago I went apeshit for Kent Jones‘ Diane (IFC Films). “One of those modest, drill-bitty, character-driven films that just reaches in and flips your light switch,” I wrote. “It makes you feel human. It makes you care.”
I was especially knocked out by Mary Kay Place‘s titular performance, but you know what? I didn’t have the courage or stamina to start re-promoting her performance when award season began several weeks back. Because Diane had opened and gone away so many months beforehand, and because IFC Films wasn’t pushing her, and because no one else was on the Mary Kay bandwagon.
And so I dropped it. I folded. I moved on. I knew she’d given one of the best lead female performances I’d seen in a long time, and I didn’t have the strength to keep reminding people of this.
But the Los Angeles Film Critics Association did. A couple of hours ago they gave Mary Kay Place their Best Actress award. My immediate reaction was one of elation mixed with a little shame. Because, as I’ve just explained, I didn’t have the fortitude. HE salutes the LAFCA foodies for doing the right thing in this regard. They showed real backbone.
Many have said this is a weak year for Best Actress performances, and they’re not wrong. Lupita Nyong’o winning two (or is it three?) Best Actress trophies for channelling Jamie Lee Curtis in her John Carpenter phase is proof of that. But Mary Kay Place is the real deal. Her Diane turn is more arresting than any other female performance I’ve seen this year.
IFC Films hasn’t mounted a Best Actress campaign for MKP because they’ve haven’t the surplus dough, but this shouldn’t stop Academy and SAG members from watching Diane at the first opportunity. It’s streaming right now on Amazon.
From my 3.27.19 review: “The Oscar situation is always weighted against intimate, small-scaled films that open in the spring, but at the very least Diane is a guaranteed Gotham and Spirit Awards contender for Best Picture. And I can’t imagine Mary Kay Place, who plays the titular character, not being an all-but-certain contender for a Best Actress Oscar nom. Unless SAG and Academy voters take leave of their senses. Which is always a possibility.”
As we speak Place is anything but an all but certain contender for a Best Actress Oscar nom, in part because of cowards like myself.
“Diane is really and truly the shit. Even if you’re a GenZ or Millennial who doesn’t want to think about what life will be like 35 or 40 years hence, it’ll still sink in. There are those, I’m presuming, who’d rather not settle into a simple Bressonian saga about the weight of responsibility and life being a hard-knocks thing a good part of the time. Or who’d rather not consider the existence of a 70-year-old New England woman who lives alone but has good friends, and who drives carefully, tries to do the right thing, works part-time in a homeless soup kitchen and has been coping with certain dark recollections for decades.