Hollywood is currently in an odd but oddly exciting place, where no one is quite sure what types of “films they don’t make anymore” they should actually start making again. We’ve seen historical epics such as Oppenheimer, erotic thrillers such as The Housemaid and female-led workplace comedies such as The Devil Wears Prada 2 all make blockbuster bank and we’re in the middle of a bumper year at the box office, edging towards a pre-pandemic total.
But around the edges or in-between the cracks, there are brackets of films that might once have been given a spotlight, yet are still being left in the dark. A film such as Miss You, Love You – a talky comedy drama about adults navigating adult issues – would never have been a smash hit exactly, but it would have occupied a space which has now mostly faded, a space where specialty releases slowly turn strong reviews into good word of mouth that in turn allows for minor, yet, impressive numbers, a sleeper hit with awards buzz. Made over two years ago and then screened for buyers at this year’s Sundance, with the help of Julia Roberts, whose husband acts as cinematographer, it was ultimately bought by HBO and shuffled into an early summer TV premiere, where it will likely go the unfortunate route quietly laid out by the network’s other purchased titles.
Robustly made and acted star-led films such as Bad Education, The Great Lillian Hall, The Tale and Reality have all failed to garner the attention, and awards, they deserved and while this is not the fault of HBO, which has at least saved them from an even more anonymous fate, it all paints a disappointing picture of where we’re at now, compared with where we once were. There’s nothing marketably distinctive or hugely of-the-moment about Miss You, Love You, but there’s more than enough here, from a towering lead performance to a sharp and textured script, to mark it as worthy of more noise than it’s sadly getting.
As conventional as it might seem – a two-hander tracking a familiar path for strangers who overcome tension to form an emotional bond – there’s also more grit and specificity than one might expect. Diane (Allison Janney) is dealing with the death of her husband, whom she had cared for after his Parkinson’s diagnosis, by making life difficult for anyone brave enough to offer their condolences. With a glass forever in hand and an armoury of withering stingers, there’s also a certain kind of Janney performance one might expect from this material. The actor, like many hard-working stars with long careers, can often feel as if she is stuck doing an impression of herself, all eye rolls and blunt putdowns, something that has previously won her a rather undeserved Oscar for I, Tonya. But there’s a keen self-awareness to the rhythm of her performance and to the script, from Jim Rash, The Descendants’ co-writer, that gives us recognisable flashes but allows for more depth and darkness than we often get to see from her, leading to one of her finest turns to date.
Diane has been reluctantly partnered with her son’s rigorously devoted assistant and maybe one-time lover Jamie (Girls alum Andrew Rannells, initially struggling to keep up but eventually finding his footing), the new focal point of her anger after he arrives to help arrange the funeral. Her son is on an important work trip and might not be able to make it at all and the pair are left trying to make their way through an impossible time together.
Reveals are small but impactful as Rash, also acting as director, keeps things mostly between the two (save for small turns by Bonnie Hunt and Oscar Nunez as tartly drawn representatives of the church Diane understandably loathes) as they struggle to understand the other and their relationship to the unseen man who ties them together. It’s unavoidably stagy, even with the cinematically remote setting of New Mexico, but the nimble, spiky writing moves us along at a fair lick and even when the misty-eyed monologues inevitably come, they’re mostly avoidant of cliche and some are genuinely, heartbreakingly effective (Diane looking back on a difficult night where she relied on anger as her dying husband remained sunny is particularly wrenching). Rash’s writing can be a little too neat at times, a little too snappily proud of itself, and some of the late-stage arguments do border on overwrought, but there’s enough nuance and lived-in detail to make up for it, any wrong foot almost immediately righted by something insightful or challenging coming straight after.
There are dog-eared issues tackled here, wounds that are often flattened by other less curious and emotionally intelligent screenwriters – grief, coming out, infidelity, unrequited love, divorce, caring for someone who is dying – but we never once question Rash’s authenticity, experience clearly bleeding into his mature, un-mawkish script. Rash forces the pair, and us, into sitting with difficult, unanswerable questions about how we love and what we expect in return and I admired his willingness to allow characters to be selfish or exhausting or hypocritical even until the very end, a finale which is miraculously both efficiently tearjerking yet lacking in too-obvious manipulation. Its scope might be small but I found its emotional impact to be surprisingly big.
Miss You, Love You premieres on HBO on 29 May in the US with UK and Australia dates to follow
