Diane Warren: Relentless (2024)

Unrated, but it would be R-rated for the f-word.  Man alive, does Diane Warren find cursing to be fun.  I'm going to talk about this a lot, but most of the documentary would probably be considered PG if Diane Warren didn't make her entire personality about being just a little bit vulgar.  There are some heavy issues late in the film involving sexual abuse that should also be considered, but much of the questionable material comes from Diane Warren's comfort with her middle finger.

DIRECTOR:  Bess Kargman

Oh man, I'm not going to be the hero of this blog.  I want to be.  I want to be on the right stuff on everything, guys.  But, honestly?  It is really hard for me to be pro-Diane Warren.  She's not a monster or anything.  If anything, she's quite sympathetic.  (Okay, she's a little sympathetic.)  But Diane Warren might be the poster child for Hollywood being completely disconnected from your average American.

I don't think I like Diane Warren as a person.  Here's me immediately backpedaling.  The movie says that Warren was diagnosed as being on the spectrum.  She said that she was diagnosed as Asperger's, which I don't think is a formal diagnosis anymore.  I have to take her quirks as something that might be beyond her control and something that should be celebrated.  But one thing that drove me absolutely crazy the entire movie is the fact that every photo of her is with her middle finger up.  It's not that I'm against people who are crass or even crassness in itself.  It's that she has basically defined herself by how counter-culture she is by picking the safest way of manifesting that counter-culture attitude.  The fact that her offices and her home are covered in things that she has purchased reminding others that she's "not like other ladies" has an irony that is somewhat lost on her.  All of that stuff exists because these attitudes replace actual personalities.  Everyone's entire take on Diane Warren seems to be that she's a little bit of a rebel.  But Warren, from my perspective, seems to be almost predictable in her behavior.

Also, it is really hard for most of America to feel bad for Diane Warren not getting an Academy Award.  It's part of the narrative of the documentary, but I honestly could not care less that Diane Warren didn't have an Oscar.  Like, there's a lot of footage in this documentary of Diane and her friends watching with baited breath to see her have to lose yet another Academy Award.  But in those announcements, I'm listening to who won the Academy Award against what song she had offered and I kept on thinking, "Yeah, the better song won."  It's not that Warren hasn't had bangers that maybe should have won.  The Aerosmith song from Armageddon probably had a bit of a shot to win.  

The insane thing is that this whole documentary almost feels like an awards push for Warren to win an Academy Award for the song in this movie.  It's actually really weird that "Dear Me" is up for an Academy Award this year because that song is...not great?  I know.  Music is incredibly subjective.  Most power ballads don't really move me.  I'm not saying that Diane Warren isn't incredibly talented.  I'm not even saying that some of those songs aren't absolutel bangers.  She has an insane back catalogue of music.  Like, hit after hit after hit.  But I do want to stress how people talk about how Oscars work.  Remember when Leo got the Oscar for The Revenant?  Like, The Revenant was fine.  I enjoyed it.  But we also knew that Leo got it because it was due.  This is a movie that is almost entirely about how Diane Warren deserves an Academy Award not for her current work, but for stuff that she lost out to twenty years ago.  We all know "Golden" is going to get it and Diane Warren will be disappointed, despite getting an honorary Oscar lifetime achievement award.  

The funny thing about me being so cynical about this documentary is that it actually has a beautiful message...if it wasn't for the way that Diane Warren lived.  Warren's story is kind of beautifully painful.  I wish she didn't suffer the things that she did.  But from an optimist's perspective, this is one of those Little Engine that Could stories.  She was raised in a house where her mother was unfeeling and adamant that Diane had to be a teacher or a secretary.  She got terrible grades and had (and I'm really trying to downplay this moment) unfortunate looks.  She wasn't interested in boys or girls.  She just wanted to play her guitar and make songs all of the time.  With the support of an open-minded father, she was able to get her music heard by the right people at the right time.  And when she got her break, she kept grinding out hit after hit, not because she was getting paid astronomical amounts of money, but because she loved writing music that much.  This should be the story that I'm recommending to everyone.  After all, I tend to not shut up about the role that art should play in our society.

And I do like that a lot of these songs have to do with Warren's life.  I mean, I suppose that I'm still wrapping my head around the notion that Warren basically led a celibate life and wrote song-after-song about the affairs of the heart.  The movie does address Warren's sexuality, having her specifically say, "I'm straight."  The weird part is that it never brings up the notion of asexuality.  I don't want to imbue her with that label.  If she isn't, she isn't.  But the movie kind of treats asexuality as a non-option.  It seems like there's actually a lot more going on with this woman than what the documentary really presents and I kind of want to know more about this.

But maybe that's me just being frustrated with the documentary.  I suppose my big annoyance with the film is that it has a lot of the same problems that fan documentaries have.  Warren is so focused on her work and on her cat.  I don't know that there's really a full-length documentary there to unpack.  The big reveal is the reveal that happens in the first moments of the film:  Diane Warren is the name behind most of the biggest songs of the 20th and 21st Centuries.  That's really cool. But we don't really get anything too damning on her.  Instead, I'm now placing a lot of stock on what they aren't showing me.  While Warren spends a lot of money taking care of animals (a valid bit of philanthropy), I'm kind of amazed that she doesn't have more investment in changing things for people who are actually struggling.  Some of that probably comes with her place on the spectrum.  A running theme is that she finds more companionship with pets than she does with people.  But she does have people in her life that don't really feel like friends so much as they are assistants.  She seems so far removed from the plight of the common man that it makes me wonder who she is.  

I want to use the most vulnerable moment of the documentary as an example of this.  One of the moments that actually pushed against Diane Warren's comfort zone is the song that she wrote for Lady Gaga about the time that she was molested.  It became this beautiful moment at the Oscars with all of these survivors of all genders came on stage and let people know that sexual assault is a far more prevalent thing than people care to acknowledge.  Considering that it was in the shadow of the #metoo movement, it seemed like this was the activism that I was looking for in Diane Warren.  But her reaction (which I keep on having to contextualize in her potential autism) was more about how she didn't win despite how powerful that scene was as opposed to the impact that the Oscars had.  To really drive that point home, Lady Gaga and the performers were backstage celebrating how vital what they had done was and Warren seemed to be sulking that she didn't win another award.  That's a bummer because it took some of the impact of that moment away.

I do want to be gracious, however.  People feel what they feel in the moment.  I can only react as an audience member does.  I wish that she had more empathy towards others.  I wish that her entire personality wasn't crass and rude.  I wish that this was a story of all the good that she had accomplished with these songs.  It oddly diminishes what is ultimately a very impressive life story of artistic achievement and passion.  But in an era where it feels like we have to struggle to have basic human rights, I don't really feel bad that Diane Warren didn't get an Oscar for songs that weren't as good as the winners.