Le Silence Du Sphinx 

In Miss You, Love You, a grieving widow is joined by her estranged son’s assistant in the lead-up to her husband’s funeral. Over the course of the week they live together, Diane and Jaime come to know each other intimately, sharing secrets that they would not in any other situation. The film, which debuted on HBO last week, tells a story of grief, anger, and forgiveness.

Grief is a tricky thing to grab ahold of, and Diane grapples with it in a variety of ways. She is mourning her husband, but in doing so she also has to cope with her son not coming home for the funeral, a stranger’s personality quirks, and existing in a small town where she doesn’t have any close friends. Throughout Miss You, Love You, Diane is in a complicated emotional state, and Jamie is forced to endure her rapid mood swings.

Janney does a fantastic job of depicting Diane as a grieving widow and mother while honoring her interiority. She’s funny and talented and sharp. Diane is a person that is nearly impossible to get to know, but deeply loyal to anyone that can crack her shell. We’ve come a long way in recent years with the depiction of women over 50 on screen, and this film is proof of that. Women’s lives don’t end after they become mothers; their self-esteem and personalities are still just as important as ever.

Miss You, Love You made the fantastic choice to keep the cast as tight as possible. Diane’s son, Tyler, is central to the plot, but he is never featured on screen. We don’t know what he looks like or sounds like, yet his presence is known. Tyler is a looming concept more than a person. He’s the reason these two people are in the same room, and the reason for so much of their collective strife. By not giving him a physicality, he is created solely through the descriptions Diane and Jamie give him. At times he is a gay casanova with a revolving door of men, at others a successful author, a failed son, or a careless friend. His presence becomes all-consuming to the audience in the same way it is in the lives of our main characters.

The absence of live theatre this year has left a gaping, red-curtain-sized hole in my heart. Now that I’m desperately missing one of my favorite things, I rely on film adaptations of musicals to supplement those long-missing endorphins and make that magic more accessible.

New to Netflix, The Prom seemed like it could be the answer to my prayers. The glitz, glam, and star-power definitely acted as a draw, but my hopefulness almost immediately soured upon starting the film. With the perfect formula to succeed, how did this film not only fall flat but become hard to sit through? Too many ill-fitted choices add up to an off-putting and distracting experience.

In this film, four has-beens of the Broadway community (played by Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, James Corden, and Andrew Rannells) attempt to boost their image by becoming the faces of a small-scale social justice movement. They come across the story of Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman), a teen in Indiana whose wish to take her girlfriend to Prom develops into a major source of contention in her community, canceling the event altogether.

Acknowledging that this film draws deeply from the source material, I can’t help but notice that, in true Ryan Murphy fashion, this narrative is packed with dramatic tricks that don’t know when to quit, and barely enough laugh-out-loud one-liners for me to count on one hand. As the group of thespians tries to persuade the town to be more inclusive, what could have been a heartwarming tale descents into cliches and problematic undoings. Most concerning of all, Emma is cast aside and wholly invalidated when she truly deserves to be the heroine of this story.