Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold

Going into this documentary without having read anything by Joan Didion, but knowing of her cultural and literary importance, I hoped to get a glimpse of what I was missing out on. This slender essayist, journalist, and memoirist created a lithe sense of authorship and self-awareness that created snapshots in time that haven't been matched by contemporary writers. She was there, she saw, she wrote.

Joan Didion’s legendary writings have been chic for forty years, and not only did she capture the counterculture and the rock n’ roll lifestyle of the sixties, but she saw its end with the Manson murders. This is the portrait that I have come to know, often sidled beside her current frail frame, on which President Obama anointed a National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal in 2013. She is seen as focused, yet aloof, and caustically raw, in a way that Lena Dunham has been trying to imitate, for many years. Probably the best part of the documentary comes when she, or a voice artist, reads passages from her many books, plays, and screenplays. Like Dreams with Sharp Teeth, this is a tool for persuasive readers who want to initiate hesitant friends and acquaintances with a new author’s work.

What works to its disadvantage is that the director is actor, and Didion’s nephew, Griffin Dunne. Sometimes he asks the hard questions, and we get a semi-satisfying answer, but for every straightforward minute of interviewing, there are four or five unanswered questions floating in the ether: What does Joan mean when she says John, her husband, was a hothead? What actually happened to her daughter? What was she like before she was married? What does literature mean to her? For a documentary about her life, and her work, there’s very little gravitas for books, in general. Instead we are given a love letter to a man’s aunt, who doesn’t even want to be seen.

I wouldn’t discourage those who want to see it to check it out, but for the diehard fans who have read most of her work, or maybe even chipped into the Kickstarter that got this film made, be wary. There’s only so much introspection that a woman can do when she already bares her soul to the page, for the entire world to see.