An Engaging but Unrevealing Doc
If there’s a single thing most people know about Diane Warren, it’s that the songs she has written perpetually lose at the Oscars. Diane Warren: Relentless offers a reminder that some of her biggest hits have not been for movies at all, including “If I Could Turn Back Time,” which was huge for Cher, and “Rhythm of the Night,” a breakthrough success recorded by the now-forgotten DeBarge back in 1985.
On screen in Bess Kargman’s documentary, she is funny, brash and also so guarded that it’s surprising she let cameras pry in the first place. She scorns romance in her private life yet writes memorable love songs, is enormously successful and rich yet even now can’t stand the slightest rejection of a song. Kargman, who has made documentaries about sports and ballet, defines the enigma of Warren without explaining it, although the film does offer clues.
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Diane Warren: Relentless
The Bottom LineEnjoyable but unrevealing.
Venue: SXSW Film Festival (24 Beats Per Second)
Cast: Diane Warren, Clive Davis, Common, Gloria Estefan, Jerry Bruckheimer, Jennifer Hudson, Cher, Randy Jackson, Toni Braxton
Director: Bess Kargman
1 hour 31 minutes
Warren’s prickliness is a refreshing change from most portraits of artists. This film will not, Warren herself makes plain, take you inside her creative process. “What’s your pro-cess?” she asks, putting on an effete voice to mock one of her least favorite questions. In her typically blunt manner, she says, “As soon as someone starts talking about that I want to kill myself.”
That lack of insight into her creativity has to be disappointing in a film about such a prolific songwriter, who does both music and lyrics. The closest we get is a glimpse at the room where she composes, the messiest office you’ve ever seen, the floor covered in papers and old-fashioned CDs. It’s a place she superstitiously refuses to clean up.
The film coasts along on the strength of many snippets of music and anecdotes from a parade of singers and producers. Cher recalls that when Warren sent her a self-recorded demo of “If I Could Turn Back Time” her response was “I hate it.” A bit of that bad demo lets us hear why. Warren, who admits she sang it terribly, did a ballad style far from the propulsive Cher version that has become a classic. Without calling attention to the idea, the documentary illustrates the importance of arrangements. The few piano chords of “Unbreak My Heart” Warren plays are striking, but the song took off thanks to Toni Braxton’s full-throated, orchestrally backed recording. Warren’s pop style is adaptable enough to entice singers as different as Leann Rimes, Jennifer Hudson and Lady Gaga, all of them among the talking heads here.
We do see that Warren really cares about earning that Oscar. Kargman’s cameras were at a slumber party she hosted for friends the night before nominations two years ago so they could wait for the announcements together. Her nomination came, for “Somehow You Do” from Four Good Days, a Glenn Close-Mila Kunis film that barely registered. That may help explain all those losses. Some of her movie songs are big — “How Do I Live Without You” from Con Air — but they aren’t always her most memorable or from major films. This year’s nomination, her 15th, was for “The Fire Inside” from the Cheetos movie Flamin’ Hot. It was never any competition for Billie Eilish and Barbie.
Warren sits for many interviews with Kargman, who gets her to talk a bit about her workaholic personal life. “I’m straight, everyone thinks I’m gay, but I don’t care what I am,” she says in one of those interviews. “I don’t want to be in a relationship.” Kargman must have pushed back. “Yeah, I kinda had one,” Warren says. “One what?” an off-camera voice asks. “One boyfriend,” Warren admits.
Smoothly, Kargman cuts to a scene with him, the music producer Guy Roche, seen reunited recently with Warren and the producer Damon Elliott sitting around in a recording studio. Roche is just as fuzzy as Warren about their relationship, which in that respect at least makes them seem like a perfect match.
“Next question, Your Honor,” Warren says at one point. It’s a trick of the film that Kargman has it both ways — exposing the difficulty of getting Warren to open up and illuminating her guardedness while doing that.
Warren’s friends explain more. Julie Horton, who ran Warren’s music publishing company for 20 years, says, “I don’t think she trusts anybody 100 percent” as a way of protecting herself. The actress Kathrine Narducci is standing next to her when Warren says, late in the film, that there is “a little Asperger’s” in her. Cindy Wiener, a friend from childhood who is now her executive assistant, confirms that Warren was diagnosed as being on the Asperger’s spectrum. It’s one of the clues that helps put her distance from people in perspective, but it is not mentioned in the film again. Narratively, Kargman and her editors deftly tease out information, with gradual reveals throughout the film, a strategy that helps disguise how little we really know its subject.
Warren is not guarded, though, when talking about her disapproving mother, who never had confidence in her, a wound that wasn’t entirely offset by her father’s encouragement. That rejection seems to have cast a shadow over Warren’s life. When she received an honorary Oscar in 2022, after both parents had passed away, she began her acceptance by looking to the heavens, holding the Oscar and joking, “Mom, I finally found a man,” and ended, “My dad is saying to my mom, ‘See, I told you so.'”
At times the film makes it too easy to be an armchair psychologist. This perfectly enjoyable documentary tells us some things about Warren, and ultimately signals there are depths we’ll never know.
