Andrew Rannells and Allison Janney in Love You, Miss You.Supplied
Imagine that one of your closest relatives is too busy to attend a family funeral and sends their assistant, a stranger, instead. What would they think of you at your rawest and most vulnerable, and how would you feel about them?
That actually happened to the writer, director and actor Jim Rash, when his sister’s assistant came to his father’s funeral. And – since Rash has a long habit of carrying his phone to family events so he can jot down the choice things they say – now it’s the premise of his new film Miss You, Love You, arriving May 29 on Crave/HBO Max.
Diane (Allison Janney), a former art curator in New York, is about to bury her second husband in New Mexico, where they moved after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. An imposing, prickly presence, she hasn’t made friends there; she’s especially disdainful of her nearest neighbour, Judith (Bonnie Hunt), a proselytizing Christian who festoons herself with turquoise.
Diane also has a complicated relationship with her adult son from her first marriage, Tyler, a gay (his sexuality is a major plot point), high-flying foreign correspondent based in Los Angeles. Though she adores him, she also resents him, because he keeps her at a distance, yet knows just when to fire off a “miss you, love you” text to reel her back in. With the funeral a week away and Tyler on assignment unsure when he’ll return, he dispatches his assistant, Jamie (Andrew Rannells), to take his place.
At first, Diane zaps Jamie with all the ire she not-so-secretly feels for Tyler, and she’s righteous and scary at the same time. Jamie, meanwhile, isn’t wholly transparent about his relationship with Tyler. But as the week progresses, each character manages – as strangers sometimes can – to ask the right questions that allow the other first to open up, and then to own up to their feelings and faults. Thresholds figure a lot in the storytelling, and Rash delicately situates both characters on the threshold between clinging to old hurts and resentments – because who would you be without them? What if the rust is the only thing holding the car together? – and moving on from them. It’s sad and funny, unexpected and beautifully observed.
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Rash originally envisioned the project as a play, and it could easily become one. There’s a lot of him in Jamie, he has said, and a lot of his own mother in Diane. (Jamie’s car in the film is really Rash’s, covered with real dust from his road trip from L.A. to the Albuquerque location.) The actors spent a month memorizing the dialogue-dense script, then shot it in long takes, often 15 minutes a go, in only 17 days.
Hunt, a brilliant but chronically underused actor, makes the most of her few scenes. But the film is pretty much a two-hander for Janney and Rannells, both of whom built careers by being invaluable supporting players: Janney won a best supporting actress Oscar for I, Tonya, and stands out in ensemble series including The West Wing, Mom and The Diplomat. Rannells brings reliable sass to projects, most recently Elsbeth, Too Much and Big Mouth. Diane and Jamie, however, are unusually multidimensional, meaty roles, and each actor makes the most of them.
In his own acting career, Rash himself is typically cast – in Community, Abbot Elementary, and scores of guest parts – as a big talker who doesn’t know he’s the butt of the joke. But as a writer and director (often partnered with Nat Faxon) on Downhill, The Way Way Back and The Descendants, he has a nuanced ear for the way family members bewitch, bother and bewilder one another. He knows how to inject humour organically into a moment – especially scenes where boiling rage topples into what it often is: absurdity. And he knows the relief that sweeps over us when someone makes the hard choice to be honest or kind.
Rash’s real subject here is unrequited love, and the emotional turmoil that elicits. When a person you ache for would rather keep it platonic, are you brave or foolish for trying to be their friend? When a beloved child turns into an adult who doesn’t want much to do with you, do you respect them, give them space, leave them alone to come to you, bear it stoically but resent it, then jump when they call, like a lovelorn teenager? Do you turn cool in return, harden your heart, protect yourself? Or do you fight back, make demands, and risk alienating them further?
Telling ourselves that we were right, or we were wronged – we cling to those stories, because they feel good. Until they don’t. It’s a testament to Rash’s writing that we sense both Diane and Jamie will walk away from their week together and do things a little differently, without that change feeling treacly or pat. Reassuringly, Rash includes a terrific payoff scene between Diane and Judith, understated but hilarious, that demonstrates how thoroughly intact Diane’s core personality remains. That’s what happens when you go through a threshold, after all – you’re still you. But you have a different view, if you care to see it.