Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold

The documentary is built from conversations with Joan Didion. She sits in her home, her hands moving, building her sentences slowly. She speaks of her childhood in California, of starting in magazines, of the pieces she wrote in San Francisco in the sixties, of the Hollywood years and of the period when she and her husband wrote screenplays together. Then come the losses: her husband John Gregory Dunne and their daughter Quintana. Two books came out of those two deaths. The film also looks at the writing itself; Didion describes why she kept notes and why a sentence was built the way it was. Griffin Dunne directs; he is her nephew and that closeness sets the film's form. Hilton Als and David Hare are among those speaking; archive photographs and family footage are used. It was made for Netflix. Its best sections are the moments when Didion reads her own text aloud. The matter it treats is writing's relation to grief; Didion describes it not as an emotional but as a technical problem. The film does not hide the closeness; the director is in frame and the questions come from inside the family. Its limit is distance; the critical view is weak and the objections raised to Didion's work are not taken up. Who it is for: readers of Didion and viewers who like documentaries about writers. Who it is not for: the tone of admiration dominates, the structure is conventional, and it offers no entry for someone new to the subject.