Oscar-winning screenwriter Jim Rash (who co-wrote Alexander Payne’s The Descendants) has penned and directed his most emotionally charged film to date (after The Way Way Back and Downhill), Miss You, Love You, about a recent widow forced to plan her husband’s funeral with her grown son’s assistant. Incapable of giving a bad performance, Allison Janney plays Diane Patterson, a native New Yorker now living in New Mexico where she and her late husband lived for decades after she cheated on her first husband and married a second time. The film attempts to deal not only with Diane’s raw grief but also her acceptance that her son (from the first husband) has never forgiven her for what she did when he was a child.
To her doorstep comes Jamie Simms (Andrew Rannells), her son’s personal assistant, who both manages his boss’s schedule and provides certain level of moral support when the son makes decisions that apparently involve international politics and negotiating tricky deals (the movie is a bit vague on his work). And even though his mother is suffering and could clearly use his sympathy, he hides behind work and Jamie. In fact, he’s effectively sent Jamie as a gift to his mother to use his organizational skills to work out any arrangements.
Both Janney and Rannells are comedic geniuses, and they certainly get plenty of opportunities to hurl zingers at each other in their few days together, but their real talent is being versatile and being able to walk that finest of lines between comedy and drama. When she finally lets down her guard enough to let Jamie be useful, Diane begins sharing stories about her history with her husband, who passed away after a long illness, as well as her complicated history with her son; the two are estranged and haven’t been together in years, and even when they text, the messages are friendly but hardly deep or intimate. Jamie’s stories center around his life as a long-closeted gay man, working for a gay man who came out much younger. It turns out what the two had in common was that everyone who was close to them already knew they were gay.
Through their respective storytelling, this unlikely mother-surrogate son pair begin to dig a little deeper into their issues, with secrets revealed and emotions exposed and experienced, perhaps for the first time. There are a few brief encounters with others in the community, including Bonnie Hunt as Diane’s nosy, church-going neighbor Judith; Suzy Nakamura as a local florist; and Oscar Nuñez as the town minister at the church Diane’s husband attended and where the funeral will be held. None of those characters are really developed enough to be anything more than cliche, but they typically add some levity to the frequently heavy proceedings.
With the feeling of a filmed play, Miss You, Love You is at its most devastating when it keeps its focus on Janney and Rannells, maneuvering around each other—one trying to figure out what the other needs, and the other being deliberately difficult to figure out. One trying to understand why her son couldn’t go against his feelings on her second marriage and come be a comfort to her, and the other wondering where he ultimately fits in in the life of his boss and best friend. There’s nothing overly complicated about the dramatic parts of this story, and Rash’s talent as a screenwriter is about creating fully formed characters and not trying to burden us with too much plot, and on both fronts, he more than succeeds. This is a work that is both delicate and rough around the edges, but with these actors at the center, it would have been really hard to screw this one up.
The film debuts Friday, May 29 on HBO, and will be available to stream on HBO Max.
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