The Keaton Files: Introduction
An exploration of the baffling 21st century filmography of one of America's greatest actresses.
It was announced with great fanfare last week that Meryl Streep was joining the cast of season 3 of Only Murders in the Building, Hulu’s charming comedy series about a trio of mystery-solving podcasters. Streep’s fans (well, me, I don’t want to speak for anyone else) were relieved, because it seemed as though her career could have used a bit of juice recently.
While Jessica Lange found a career resurgence working with Ryan Murphy, and Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Pfeiffer are both getting those franchise dollars with Avatar and Ant-Man, respectively, Streep’s movies don’t seem to have the impact they once did. Though she made two critically acclaimed but little seen by the general public films with Steven Soderbergh in recent years, her most notable role of late was being miscast as a Trump stand-in in Adam McKay’s insufferable Don’t Look Up. Her warmth and crack comic timing are a perfect fit for Only Murders in the Building, however, and a smart choice.
Perhaps season 4 can feature a role for Diane Keaton, who can also be extremely funny, and was once perhaps Streep’s closest competitor as America’s most important actress in the 70s and 80s. When one considers Keaton’s six-decade film career, the first thing that may come to mind is her wounded, faraway stare as Al Pacino literally closes her out of his life at the end of The Godfather. Or maybe it was when she was both a fashion icon and Woody Allen’s favorite comic muse in Annie Hall. In virtually everything she did, Keaton brought a quiet strength or dry wit (sometimes both) to her performance, playing characters who felt lived-in and believable.
Keaton has never experienced a career lull. However, she’s chosen to spend the last two decades starring in a series of increasingly unmemorable (and often interchangeable) comedies that, with few exceptions, meet with mediocre (or worse) reviews and make almost nothing at the box office. They don’t even find a second life on streaming, but rather just disappear into the ether, a waste of time and/or money for everyone involved. They’re non-movies, not even showing up as Sunday afternoon hangover entertainment on TBS.
A quick skim of Keaton’s filmography suggests that the transition began around 1987’s Baby Boom, yuppie wish fulfillment relying on the extremely labored premise that, in the event of their death, someone would leave the custody of their toddler-age child to a distant cousin they haven’t seen or heard from in years1. It’s understandable that, following such films as The Little Drummer Girl, in which she plays an actress forced to join the Palestine Liberation Organization undercover, and Shoot the Moon, the most emotionally traumatizing movie about divorce since Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, Keaton would want to do something light for a change. However, other than 1989’s The Good Mother, a child custody drama that nobody saw, bland comedies are virtually all she’s done. More specifically, bland comedies often based around weddings or holidays, featuring characters2 who have beach homes in the Hamptons and haven’t been in a five-figure tax bracket since the mid-80s.
The future of Keaton’s career was sealed with Father of the Bride, a perfectly fine movie that for whatever reason (presumably Martin Short talking in a funny accent) ended up being one of the biggest hits of 1991. Since then, most of the movies she’s appeared in all seem to take place in the same lily-white universe, and all of the characters are minor variations on the same person, a nice but often neurotic wife3 and mother whose most pressing issue is that she doesn’t like her adult son’s new girlfriend.
Let me be clear: I don’t think Keaton is struggling to find work, and taking whatever she can get. I think these are deliberate choices, presumably because they’re low-effort, they pay pretty well, and she gets to wear nice clothes. They’re like pottery classes, something to keep her busy. I’m not interested so much in trying to understand the reasoning behind her 21st-century filmography as whether or not any of these mostly forgotten movies are actually any good, or even hidden gems. I plan to go through her entire filmography (narration and voiceover work excepted) starting in the next couple weeks with 2000’s Hanging Up up till now (or until I get distracted or lose the will to live) and rank them best to worst, both in film quality and how nice the house her character lives in is. Because these aren’t movies, really, they’re issues of House Beautiful brought to glorious life, and everything else is secondary.
While I have high hopes for Something’s Gotta Give, Because I Said So is already giving me hives in anticipation, and I might need to re-up my Xanax prescription for The Family Stone. I don’t even know what the hell to expect with Darling Companion, which I only just heard of now, or And So it Goes, which stars Diane Keaton and Michael Douglas, and was directed by Rob Reiner, but somehow only got 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s the suspense that makes writing a pithy pop culture newsletter the sport of kings.
Up next: Hanging Up (2000)
Despite this, it’s surprisingly not terrible, but that’s thanks largely to sexy small-town veterinarian Sam Shepard.
In 2008’s Mad Money, Keaton plays a character whose last name is literally Cardigan. This would be like creating a white trash character and giving him the last name Jorts.
To be fair, sometimes she’s a widow or divorcée.
I watched Hanging Up a couple years ago and I remember it feeling pretty unhinged so I’m excited to read