The Film “Miss You, Love You”: Reflections on Grief, Love, Motherhood, and Gayness

Allison Janney as grieving widow Diane is terrific in HBO Max’s “Miss You, Love You.” Her co-star, Andrew Rannells, as her author-son’s assistant Jamie, is also excellent—he is a “two-timeTony-nominated Broadway star,” and Janney also has considerable theater background. Both Jamie and son Tyler are gay, and their gayness figures prominently in the drama, even though Tyler never appears in Dianes’s New Mexico home, where most of the story unfolds.

Shortly after Diane’s second husband, Henry, dies from Parkinson’s complications—they had been together for about three decades—assistant Jamie drives up to help Diane with all the funeral preparations. (Henry was a Protestant churchgoer; Diane was not a churchgoer of any sort.)

Tyler’s father was Diane’s first husband, and Diane had an affair with Henry before she married him—Tyler’s father (who remains unnamed) also had an extra-marital affair. According to Diane, Tyler never “made an effort to have any kind of relationship with him”(Henry), and when still a young boy Tyler declared, “I'm on dad's side." (Film dialogue is taken from the filmscript.)

Diane’s feelings for Henry were appreciative—“I see Henry patient and joyful and loving . . . all for me so I'd feel better. The one who wasn't dying. When I look at that [a picture], I see me still here without the only man who ever truly knew me, everything about me, and stayed despite that.” But she resented the Parkinson’s that was slowly draining his life away. “I don't see the beauty of him painting it [he was a painter]. I see the tragedy of him not finishing it. I see me hating his body because it wouldn't listen to him, hating how long it took him to put on his seat belt, or to find the breath to tell a story he told so many times before. I see me . . . angry and frustrated and short."

Despite her grumpy state after Henry’s death, Diane also sees herself as a loving mother to Tyler. She tells Jamie: “After his father and I divorced . . . the one thing we agreed upon was that our priority was to be Tyler. He should know nothing from us but love.” Later, when at age 23 he told his mom of his gayness, she anticipated it, telling him, “I love you.” She also tells Jamie that from the time the nine-year-old Tyler told her he was “on dad’s side,” she has “shown “nothing but love, because I knew he needed it. I knew he wanted it, and still does to this day. It just . . . it just comes with a price. But I have never, never stopped being his mom. I've . . . I have stayed his mom. And . . . and against my better judgment, I have kept helping Tyler through any doorway he struggles with.” 

Although most of the film occurs at Diane’s New Mexican home and involves dialogue between Diane and Jamie, there are a few scenes inside the church where the funeral service occurs. Henry had requested the Beach Boys’ "God Only Knows" (with its refrain of “God only knows what I'd be without you”) as people arrive, and "You're the First, My Last, My Everything" by Barry White as they leave, but the minister and choir director vetoed those suggestions and opted for something more traditional.

But Diane gets in the last word. Standing behind the church lectern, she says, “I wasn't going to get up here. Henry would not expect it. He's probably rolling his eyes right now. But he was clear about . . . what he wanted . . . from me. And I need to finish that.” And tentatively she begins reciting and then singing Barry White’s "You're the First, My Last, My Everything":

The first, my last . . .

my everything.
And the answer to all my dreams.

You are my sun, my moon . . .

my guiding star . . .

My kind of wonderful
That's what you are

I know there's only
One like you
There's no way
They could have made . . .

As she falters, Jamie, sitting in a pew, helps her and adds, "Yeah, you're all I'm living for. Your love I'll keep for evermore.” And then they both add, “You're the first. You're the last .”

In addition to the fine acting by Janney and Rannells, the film features the writing and directing of actor-director-comedian Jim Rash, whose sister sent her own assistant to their father’s funeral, furnishing Jim with the idea which eventually became central to the film.