The Centre Will Not Hold: Joan Didion Documentary

 

In 'The Centre Will Not Hold', Dunne, an actor, producer, and director—and the son of Didion’s brother-in-law, the late Dominick Dunne—is questioning Didion about “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” her essay describing the hippie scene of Haight-Ashbury in 1967. That essay consisted of a fragmentary rendering of a dysfunctional social world that had been improvised by vulnerable children and predatory grownups, framed by Didion’s elegiac, magisterial summation of a civilization gone off its rails: “Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.” It was the work for which Didion was best known and most esteemed in the many decades of literary production that preceded “The Year of Magical Thinking,” the memoir of marriage and bereavement that, when it was published, in 2005, granted her a vast, popular success.

The documentary, which was co-produced by Didion’s grandniece (and Griffin’s cousin) Annabelle Dunne, offers many other pleasures and insights. The camera roves the books on Didion’s shelves—Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck, Doris Lessing, Dante, Beatrix Potter—and shows her puttering in her kitchen, where there is a television on the counter, like people used to have before the news came on their phones. There are the family photographs that show Didion and members of the Dunne family in California, where she spent her girlhood and a significant chunk of her adulthood, and there are family memories that few potential interviewers could offer. In one early moment, Dunne tells Didion that he remembers vividly their first meeting, at a family gathering when he was five years old. He had been wearing a tight, short bathing suit, he recalled, and had been mortified when John Gregory Dunne, his uncle and Didion’s husband, pointed out that one testicle had escaped its confines. “You were the only one that didn’t laugh,” Dunne tells Didion, who sits next to him, beaming. “I always loved you for that.” Didion’s own memories are illuminating, too. She describes one domestic routine of her marriage: John would rise in the morning, build a fire, make breakfast for their young daughter, Quintana, and take her to school. “Then I would get up, have a Coca-Cola, and start work,” Didion says. It is an instructive if not necessarily exemplary solution to the writer-mother’s perennial challenge of combining creative work with being a parent.

There are interviews with Didion’s friends, like David Hare, who directed Didion’s dramatization of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” the book written immediately after the sudden death of John Gregory Dunne, who keeled over from a heart attack one winter evening in 2003, sitting down to dinner. Hare used the opportunity, he tells Dunne, to insist that Didion eat, her already waifish frame having dwindled still further in widowhood. One surprise that “The Center Will Not Hold” provides is the disparity between Didion’s physical fragility—Dunne’s camera lingers on her hands, gnarled and expressive, and her emaciated arms, which look as if they have been flayed for an anatomist’s dissection—and her voice, which is firm and strong. A formidable sound emanates from this delicate instrument. The film is a model of empathetic reporting: by its end, the viewer’s stand-in is President Obama, who, after bestowing upon Didion the National Medal of Arts, in 2013, holds her antique hands with a carefully calibrated balance of respect and tenderness.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-most-revealing-moment-in-the-new-joan-didion-documentary