How angry would you be if your life partner suddenly died and your son sent an employee along to help with the funeral, rather than turning up himself?
That is the opening position of Miss You, Love You, an unusual two-hander running largely on bile. One of life’s great joys is watching Allison Janney playing righteously angry women and there’s plenty of that going on here. Furious Diane Patterson (Janney) on one side and meekly apologetic Jamie Simms (Andrew Rannells) on the other. The grieving wife and the office assistant, she needing help at this time… just not him. And Jamie there because he’s being paid to be, he’d probably rather be anywhere else.
It’s a stage play, obviously so, and apart from Janney Rannells there’s just the tiniest bit of an extra assist from Diane’s toxic neighbour Judith – every intervention by Bonnie Hunt golden (as in stream-of-piss golden).
The writer/director is Jim Rash, who did The Way Way Back, which he co-directed with Nat Faxon, who gets a producer credit here. That was a delicate exploration of alternative family set-ups, depending on how you looked at it, and so is this. After initial prickliness, a few glasses of hooch on Diane’s part and much havering and standing on one foot by Jamie, we get background intel on the missing son – he’s a media dude waiting on an interview in Khartoum which will be the making of his career. So his absence is forgivable? And on the husband, who had Parkinson’s and was a painter, and liked Barry White and the Beach Boys. And on Diane. She isn’t just furious about her husband’s death, but about the fact that he forced her to move from cosmopolitan New York to the arid desert (in every sense) of New Mexico, where he wanted to live out his last years and where she is now well and truly beached.
As for Jamie, it turns out he is gay, and so is Diane’s son, Tyler. A potential avenue for emotional exploration opens up, which Rash dives up once he’s taken the chill off the opening frostiness and Diane and Jamie are approaching confidant level.
It’s an Odd Couple movie, of sorts, though Rash keeps us guessing, and Janney’s skill at being entertainingly waspish and scathing is used to stop things getting too cosy. Maybe there’s also a hint of Xavier Dolan’s Tom at the Farm, which was also all about the wrong person being at the wrong place at the wrong time, with sexual politics bubbling along in the background.
Rash shot it at a clip and apparently both lead actors memorised the entire script and just went for it in long takes. This has the effect of making it more obvious that we’re watching a play on screen, and that these are actors pretending to be people, rather than the people themselves. Doubtless Rash intended the opposite to be the case but there you are.
There are also “big speech” moments that mark it out as something you might watch in a darkened studio theatre somewhere… and probably enjoy.
Interestingly, considering that Diane is the one carrying the grievance, and doing the grieving, the story begins to turn more and more on the character of Jamie, who’s not quite as he first appears. As Diane recedes in importance, Jamie’s claims to the spotlight don’t always seem that strong. We’re asked to compare and contrast the situation of Diane and Jamie and come down, I think, increasingly on Jamie’s side, even though he’s obviously more of an operator than at first appears.
Not entirely convinced, in a nutshell. The conclusion is that both of these characters are people who need to move on, pronto. Watch it for the performances, particularly Janney.
Miss You, Love You – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
