Since the release of Something’s Gotta Give in 2003, Diane Keaton has enjoyed a busy career playing women of a certain age getting a second shot at life and love. In fact, this whole period can be interpreted as one long film in which Diane Keaton gets a second shot at life and love over and over again. Her latest film, Book Club, is about four women getting a second shot at life and love, which is, if nothing else, a nice twist. In order to reinforce this basic format, Diane Keaton films feature certain recurrent themes. In the unlikely event that you might want to write your own, here are the elements you will need …
1 Diane Keaton
It may seem obvious to note that Diane Keaton is in every Diane Keaton film, but the characters she plays are, in virtually every respect, the same character, except with different glasses. She’s always charming, anxious, brave, optimistic and unflinchingly liberal, with a tendency to rattle on when nervous. Her relationship status is either widowed (Hampstead, And So It Goes) or divorced (Something’s Gotta Give, The Big Wedding). She has usually managed to overcome the loneliness and isolation to carve out a rewarding single life, although it turns out not to be quite as rewarding as having a problematic relationship with an irascible and unpardonably selfish old man. Or, in the case of Hampstead, an unpardonably selfish old man who lives in a park.
2 Cigarettes
Smoking seems to be something of a generational fault line here, with cigarettes representing some kind of last ditch, third-age defiance. In And So It Goes, an elderly estate agent named Claire ignores a request to stop smoking in a restaurant. In The Big Wedding, Robert De Niro smokes two fags at once in a bid to shake off his wife’s health regime. Keaton herself lights up, improbably, at the end of Something’s Gotta Give. “I’m in Paris!” she says.
3 Annie Hall’s wardrobe
Keaton’s singular dress code – buttoned-up shirts, big belts, scarves in the house – gets an outing in all these films, sometimes as a plot point: Jack Nicholson criticises her habit of wearing turtlenecks in Something’s Gotta Give; she buys a beret in Hampstead (identical to one she wears in Because I Said So) in order to telegraph some kind of awakening; Book Club contains a scene in which her friends try to get her to de-layer ahead of a first date.
4 Academy award winners
It is almost as if Keaton’s contract prevents her from working with people who haven’t also won Oscars, no matter how inconsequential or unpromising the project. In other words, her films are characterised by a lot of poorly deployed fire-power: Jack Nicholson in Something’s Gotta Give; both De Niro and Susan Sarandon in The Big Wedding; Michael Douglas in And So It Goes. Book Club boasts three: Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen and Richard Dreyfuss. Darling Companion sees Keaton co-starring with Kevin Kline and Dianne Wiest, alongside Oscar nominees Richard Jenkins and Sam Shepherd. It is also written and directed by four-time nominee Lawrence Kasdan, and it’s basically about a dog going missing.
5 A daughter or daughters
Basically, offspring whose primary mission is to push their mother into taking a second shot at life and love, even as they struggle with life and love themselves. It’s the daughter in Something’s Gotta Give who first drags Jack Nicholson home, as her new, much older boyfriend. In Hampstead the role is played, unusually, by a son (James Norton). Because I Said So (2007) makes use of three daughters, like King Lear, but that’s not a recommendation.
6 An awkward third-age sex scene
Keaton films normally contain a moment – about two-thirds of the way through – when her character has sex for the first time in a long time, an encounter that either begins awkwardly, or ends badly, or both. The films often strive to celebrate senior sexuality while also making it seem comically inept and mildly mortifying. The result is invariably troubling. Book Club will have to get over a high bar.
Book Club is in UK cinemas now
