Diane 2018

Diane Lucia Rhodes

Diane

As film industry reviewers, we say Diane is one of our non-favorite movies. Please VOTE!

Diane is favorite or unfavorite?

Diane devotes her days to helping others, tending to aging friends and family, and trying to repair a broken relationship with her drug-addicted son, and in the process comes to a new understanding of herself and her past.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this feature film!

About Diane 💬

Kent Jones's fiction feature debut, DIANE is the story of a woman who experiences something both common and extraordinary: her life, as she has come to know it, vanishing before her eyes as time rushes on like a river. Diane Lucia Rhodes (Mary Kay Place) lives alone in western Massachusetts, spending her days caring for others and always putting herself last. Her life revolves around her cousins, her friends, her beloved aunts and uncles, and the people she serves at church suppers. Her most precious burden is her grown son, Brian (Jake Lacy), constantly in-and-out of rehab but not fully honest with himself about his addiction. And hovering over Diane's duty-bound existence is the shadow of guilt for an old sin. Solitude opens to new levels of perception and being... past and present collide... people come and go... and Diane is confronted with the possibility of forgiveness.

• INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR KENT JONES

Q: DIANE is obviously a very personal film. Can you talk about the character of Diane and how close she is to you?

Kent Jones: When I was very young, I wanted to make films - I took a long time to get there, but some things take as long as they need to. I wanted to make a film about my great aunts, all of whom were still alive at the time. I remember writing the title ''The Aunts'' in my notebook and drawing a couple of storyboards. My grandmother was the eldest of 10, with an 11th half-brother. They were real Yankees, born on the Canadian border, and they came of age during the depression. They were funny, they were cruel, they were caring, they were harsh, and I loved them all. The women were the dominant personalities, while the men tended to be quieter, just kind of there. So the idea for a film about that world, the world in which I grew up, was with me for a long time. When I saw Coppola's version of THE RAINMAKER, I had a shock of recognition with Mary Kay Place's performance as the mother of the dying boy. That was a southern story and Mary Kay's from Oklahoma, but it was the spirit of my aunts. I had always liked Mary Kay - in MARY HARTMAN, in NEW YORK, NEW YORK, in STARTING OVER, and THE BIG CHILL. But this was something else: an immediate, visceral reaction, which I guarded closely for the next couple of decades.

I start to develop it over the years, write up scenes and storylines. I always knew that she would spend a lot of time driving, that she would have a troubled relationship with her son, that loss and guilt would haunt her. At one point I read The Professor's House by Willa Cather, and then it turned another corner. I'd written another script that almost got made, with a character somewhat like Brian in DIANE. They were both inspired by the experience of a very close friend.

Q: So Diane is an amalgamation of different people?

Kent Jones: Yes, but... basically, she's my mother. I met Mary Kay in 2013, and I told her what I wanted to do. We stayed in touch and became good friends. At some point, I sent her the other script, just to read. She said, ''It's great, and I hope you write the one you told me about.''

Near the end of 2014, my mother died. And a couple of months later I heard from Mary Kay, gently checking in to see where I was at with the script. So I decided that I would not respond until I had a first draft, which I finished in Paris when I was mixing HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT.

Q: There are many destabilizing moments in the final passages, as the film transitions to a different plane.

Kent Jones: But that's life... the porous borders between imagination and reality, now and then, space and time. Life sort of is a hallucination. I'm reminded of this beautiful thing that David Hockney said to Martin Gayford in their book of interviews, that he's all for people going into outer space, but that the space between earth and Jupiter is finally much less mysterious and interesting than the space between you and me.

Diane Movie Details 🎥

Directed by

Kent Jones

Writing Credits

Kent Jones

Starring

Mary Kay Place

Jake Lacy

Celia Keenan-Bolger

Mary Fuller

Deirdre O'Connell

Andrea Martin

Phyllis Somerville

Kerry Flanagan

Estelle Parsons

Joyce Van Patten

Glynnis O'Connor

Paul McIsaac

Ray Iannicelli

Danielle Ferland

Marcia Haufrecht

Charles Weldon

Cara Yeates

Gabriella Rhodeen

Teri Gibson

Robert Vincent Smith

Patrick Husted

LaChanze

Barbara Andres

George Riddle

Music by

Jeremiah Bornfield

Cinematography by

Wyatt Garfield

Genre: Drama

Country: United States

Diane Official Trailer

Our Choice

Unfavorite 👎 Unfavourite

It's Your Turn!




✋ This content is prepared by All Favorite Movies (AFM).

📣 You can take part in a vote, leave a comment and share in your social media to spread the world your favorite movies!