Miss You, Love You Review: Sometimes, Watching Actors Act Is Enough

As much as I appreciate film style, sometimes all a movie needs to work is to let the actors do their thing unencumbered. The best tool cinema has to move an audience remains the human face; the fewer barriers between us and the person on screen, the quicker we can form an emotional connection. Pair that philosophy with a knockout script, and you’re already most of the way toward making a great movie.

But the material won’t always be bulletproof. Miss You, Love You, the new film from writer-director Jim Rash, is somewhat overwrought as a drama. It’s built to play up its emotional stakes as much as reasonably possible, to give its stars, Allison Janney and Andrew Rannells, plenty of big, talky exchanges to chew on. As the grief-oriented story approaches its climax, the gap between what I felt and what the movie seemed to want me to feel grew large enough that I became self-conscious about it. It’s not unlike discovering that someone is way more into you than you are them.

But, in the right hands, too-muchness can itself be enjoyable. It’s fun to watch capital-A Acting, and Rash knows it. Miss You, Love You has a series of extended, two-hander scenes that are all about giving Janney and Rannells the room to make choices, reveal character, respond to each other’s energy, and inhabit a fluctuating range of difficult emotions. Their ebb-and-flow gets a little repetitive, but at just 97 minutes, the film doesn’t overstay its welcome. If you like character dramas and are looking for something to queue up on a free evening, you could do much worse than Miss You, Love You.

As The Premise Grows Stale, Allison Janney & Andrew Rannells Keep You Watching

Rash deserves some credit for finding an unconventional but potentially fruitful character dynamic to center his movie around. Jamie (Rannells) is assistant to Jack, a successful writer currently abroad researching his new book. Diane (Janney) is Jack’s mother, whose husband Henry, Jack’s step-father, has just died after a long illness. Since Jack is stuck overseas, he sends Jamie to help with the arrangements in his place, with the possibility that he’ll be back for the funeral.

It’s obvious from the moment Jamie and Diane meet that this account of events shouldn’t be taken at face value. Diane’s relationship with her son is strained, and it seems he hardly wanted one with Henry at all. She is a strong presence, both willful and intimidating – in other words, an Allison Janney character – and when Jamie arrives, she’s fully prepared to knock him off balance. She tosses out barbed words as easily as she changes the subject, daring him to keep up. She forces him to define what, exactly, this arrangement means, and that proves a pretty interesting question.

The film feels far less novel than its premise…

This seems like the kind of movie that would be powered by these two very different people learning from each other’s ways of moving through the world, and there is a little of that. Miss You, Love You is interspersed with interactions with members of the local New Mexico community that, despite moving there a couple years ago from New York at her husband’s request, Diane has resisted joining, and Jamie moves among them far more easily. But the film is really structured around revelations, and how each new piece of information either brings the two protagonists closer together or further apart.

Jamie and Diane face each other in Miss You, Love You

At its best, the camera is trained on the actors and picking up the minutiae of how the changing distance manifests in their performances. Janney, especially, is a joy to watch. Diane is in a very combustible place, and as we learn more about her and Jack’s past, we come to understand the layers of hurt in play at any given moment. We’re somehow able to tell exactly how much of it is being directed at Jamie just by how Janney narrows and widens her eyes. Though Rannells also gets his chances to blow up, he’s more affecting on the receiving end, cleanly communicating his reactions with a twinge of facial expression.

The benefit of exploring a rarely seen on-screen dynamic is that we don’t really have much of a sense of where it’s headed, and Miss You, Love You is at its most engaging when focused on the relationship between these two people. The emotional beats of Diane and Jamie’s respective relationships with Jack, which unfortunately end up the subject of most of their conversations, are much easier to predict. The film feels far less novel than its premise, which is a shame. This pairing, both of characters and of actors, had the potential to be something more distinct.

The more standard it feels, the harder it becomes to be swept up in the narrative swells, and the film’s reach eventually exceeds its grasp. But even if it isn’t shattering, Miss You, Love You still entertains.

Miss You, Love You is available to stream on HBO Max from Friday, May 29.