THE STORY – A grieving widow is forced to plan her husband’s funeral with her estranged son’s assistant.
THE CAST – Allison Janney, Andrew Rannells, Bonnie Hunt, Oscar Núñez & Suzy Nakamura
THE TEAM – Jim Rash (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 97 Minutes
For TV viewers, Jim Rash is probably best known and loved as the flamboyant Dean Pelton in the NBC comedy, “Community.” But to film fans, he’s the Oscar-winning co-screenwriter of “The Descendants” and “The Way Way Back,” which he also co-directed with his writing partner, Nat Faxon. For his latest project, however, Rash is going solo, writing and directing his comedic drama, which draws on themes he has dealt with before but examines them through a distinctly different lens.
Given his experience as a longtime member of the L.A. comedy troupe The Groundlings, it’s not surprising that Rash has woven a sharp edge of humor into his dramatic scripts. His richly drawn characters are usually part of a large ensemble, and the subjects he’s taken on have ranged from coming-of-age comedies to darker examinations of death and grief. For his first solo effort, Rash leans heavily toward the latter theme, taken from a real-life incident in his own family.
Following the death of her husband, Henry, Diane Patterson (Allison Janney) asks her estranged son, Tyler, a jet-setting reporter, to return home to help her with his father’s funeral arrangements. He begs off and sends his personal assistant, Jamie Simms (an excellent Andrew Rannells) as a replacement, infuriating Diane. Ever the good assistant, Jamie is obsequious to a fault in trying to calm the angry mother, which only intensifies her bitterness. Recognizing that the withering insults she’s hurling at him are really meant for her son, Jamie lets her get them all out of her system. Their intensity, however, makes it clear that this job will be more difficult than he expected.
Look, we’ve all seen enough movies where two people are thrown together and bickering through Act 1, only to become friends or lovers by Act 3. (Just a spoiler: the latter does not happen here.) But Rash is a skilled enough writer to recognize that reality, so he gradually paces Diane’s eventual thaw toward Jamie, much as it often happens in real life. Recalling the maxim of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Jamie opts to stand by Diane when she resists her church’s minister (Oscar Núñez) and its choirmaster (Bonnie Hunt), who blithely ignore Henry’s final wishes for his funeral. Their bond momentarily secured, Diane and Jamie begin to build up a sense of trust that they’ll need to get through this funeral together. Eventually, that trust leads them to share several unspoken truths, and here’s where “Miss You, Love You” really begins to click, and both actors raise their game.
The action moves fully indoors, the supporting characters are dispensed with, and the film finally becomes the two-handed play it was initially designed to be. Indeed, both actors approached the film as if it were a stage play, memorizing the entire script and getting off book before a single frame was shot. That allowed Rash to film several scenes in a single, uninterrupted take, sometimes lasting up to 20 minutes, which only intensified the emotions in the text.
It also underlined the theatrical nature of the piece, the downside of which is that there are moments, particularly in Act 3, that it feels like you’re watching a filmed play rather than a living, breathing movie. And as much as the actors scale their performances to the requirements of the medium, the intensity required to play the text properly might better be suited to the scale of a proscenium stage rather than to the intimacy of a film close-up. Still, as theatrical as it might be, I would not have wanted to give up Janney’s lengthy monologue, which serves as the film’s dramatic climax as Diane lays her soul bare, morphing from a bitter widow to a woman caught up in a grief far deeper than she ever expected. It easily ranks high among Janney’s best recent filmography.
Even with the theatrical nature of some dialogue, most of Rash’s script is sharp, funny, and, most of all, empathetic. He has created real people in genuine pain, whose families have abandoned them, but each comes to realize that, at times, one can only find solace in the kindness of strangers. As conventional as the film’s narrative might seem at first, Rash goes out of his way to avoid a pat, snuggly ending. When the characters finally part, it’s messy, and I mean that in the most complimentary terms. Diane and Jamie don’t quite know what to say – which, at times, is just like real life – but both know that they have been changed for the better from crossing paths. And that’s the small miracle that “Miss You, Love You” so skillfully illustrates.
