A faithful doc recounting Joan Didion's great momemts, good and bad.
Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
Grade: A
Director: Griffin Dunne (The Accidental Husband)
Cast: Didion, Tom Brokaw, Dick Cheney, et al.
Rating: Documentary
Runtime: 1h 34M
By: John DeSando
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” — Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968
Iconic writer Joan Didion kept this philosophy throughout her writing and her life: a sense that the past infuses the present, the ones we love affect us sometimes after they are gone, and even politics has its dramatic and poetic underbelly. The documentary
Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, shows these traits to be true with a poignancy only a close relative could depict.
Driven as Sommer Marie and I were by our disappointment on It’s Movie Time about the film adaptation of her political novel, The Last Thing He Wanted, I revisited her life in this documentary, renewed by remembering her achievement from Slouching Toward Bethlehem in 1967 to her more recent reflections on her husband’s and daughter’s deaths. She has remained honest and caring, wistful and trenchant, about loss for herself and for her world. No one is surprised that she was a first in 1991 to write that the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted.
This documentary will drive you to read about her life in California and New York, fiction and non-fiction leading to sociopath portraits that are a staple of American fiction presaging worse times for America. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold is a documentary worth seeing just as her works are worth reading. She is America with a jaundiced but loving eye. Don’t let her frail mien deceive you—she is every bit worthy of the age she depicts.
“We all remember what we need to remember.” A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JohnDeSando62@gmail.com.
