Tonight, Griffin Dunne will be at the Walter Reade Theater to take part in a Q&A following a screening of the documentary he’s made about his aunt, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. The New York Film Festival will then present the film once more on Saturday as part of its Spotlight on Documentary program.
For Variety, Brent Lang talks with Dunne, but first: “Joan Didion has been at the center of our cultural and political life for more than five decades, writing incisively on everything from war to rock music to murder in books such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and Salvador. As an essayist, novelist, critic, and screenwriter, she’s inspired a passionate following that is nearly unmatched in American letters. That status reached near deification levels with 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking. In it, she reflects on her own personal tragedy, recounting her grief after the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, and her struggle to deal with the fatal illness of her daughter, Quintana Roo. By writing so unflinchingly about such a painful topic, she formed an even deeper connection with her readers.”
The Center Will Not Hold “provides a concise overview of her ever-shifting career, from the early essays to the novels to the political writing, and recounts the tragedy that led to her most recent books, but its main attraction is the voice of Didion herself,” writes Craig Hubert for the Literary Hub. “While she offers little that even the most casual admirer of her work won’t already know, it’s her presence that makes the film stand out—the author’s physical fragility, on full display, adds a layer of poignancy that permeates everything around it.”
Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey: “Sometimes she seems to search for the words, in a way we don’t expect from one of the single finest wordsmiths of our time, but then she zonks you; it was just a well-placed beat, or the ramp-up to a laugh line that she’s clearly thought out in advance, and it couldn’t matter less (‘I wasn’t surprised that it was turned into a movie. I wish they’d turned it into a better movie’). The decades she’s spent defining that persona make The Center Will Not Hold all the more valuable; this is a very personal portrait.”
Last month, Dana Spiotta visited Didion and Dunne for Vogue and noted that the film “doesn’t ignore her glamour, but, perhaps because it was made by family, it adds something new: a tender, life-size portrait of Joan Didion as a person. In their scenes together, she and Griffin have a touching rapport; when he recalls first meeting her as a young boy, she laughs at the memory and leans into him, entirely at ease. Her deep attachment to family is not news to Didion readers—she has written about her mother and father and extensively about her husband and daughter. But to see her family and friends telling her story alongside the readings from her work is to make it all seem of a piece, to bring the whole of the life into focus.”
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