Aahana Swrup
‘Miss You, Love You’ presents a remarkable story in which love and loss become the foundation of a first meeting between two strangers. Diane is a widow who is grieving the loss of her husband, Henry. However, in the lead-up to the funeral, her son, Tyler, an author, finds himself with other obligations to attend to. As a result, he ends up sending his assistant, Jamie, to help his mother with the funeral.
Naturally, the assistant’s presence at Diane’s house doesn’t come without certain tension. In the emotionally brittle time, Jamie’s presence, but mostly Tyler’s absence, effectively turns Diane’s house in New Mexico into a crockpot of pressure and friction. The film deals with intimate, yet universal emotions of grief and complex resentment through an intriguing and atypical premise. In doing so, it achieves a poignant sense of authenticity.
Miss You, Love You is Inspired by a Real-Life Incident
Although not biographical, ‘Miss You, Love You’ is partially inspired by a story that unraveled in real life. Jim Rash, the writer and director behind the project, tragically lost his father around 8 years ago to Parkinson’s disease. When the filmmaker went home for the funeral arrangements, he met his sister’s assistant. At the time, his sister had to deal with professional engagements, so her assistant had tagged along as a helping hand. “I had never met him; he had never met anybody,” Rash said of his sister’s assistant in a conversation with Awards Buzz.
Rash continued, “So I just thought that was very curious to me, just the basic premise of being, through his (his sister’s assistant) eyes, the lens of somebody in such an emotionally vulnerable place with a bunch of strangers. From there on, it was just crafting it based on that scenario and then creating Jamie and Diane and just seeing how that would operate. From there, I just started using things, hodgepodge of truth.” Initially, the filmmaker envisioned the story as a play, which inevitably turned into a film. Over time, the plot developed, branching from its original real-life-inspired premise into fictitious ideas and plotlines. Thus, the final product remains founded on a real incident that takes a fictionalized life of its own on the screen.
Writer/Director Jim Rash Imbues His Own Experiences in Jamie and Diane’s Characters
The premise of ‘Miss You, Love You’ is the central part of the film with a firm basis in reality. From there, the characters, their inner lives, and their storylines all come with the addition of fictional conception and development. Still, there are parts of Jamie and Diane’s characterizations that find deep roots in the experiences of their creator, Jim Rash. The inciting event in the story, Henry’s death, presents a mirror to the loss the filmmaker suffered after losing his father to Parkinson’s.
As a result, a lot of Diane’s complicated feelings and emotions surrounding Henry’s death remain inspired by Rash’s own reality. For instance, Rash pulled from his own complex emotions surrounding his father’s Parkinson’s disease when writing about Diane’s similar experiences. In fact, a couple of storylines regarding the same were directly inspired by real-life instances from Rash’s life. As a result, Diane’s grief over losing her loved one, as well as her more complicated feelings of frustration and discontent in grappling with caring for someone with a terminal disease, find an authentic basis in reality.
This allows Diane’s narrative to become more resonant with a wide range of the audience. Similarly, Jamie’s character also finds some pivotal autobiographical inspiration. Notably, Rash has shared that he placed a lot of himself in Jamie’s character and his narrative. Although the details of the similarities between the filmmaker and the character remain ambiguous, it certainly adds a layer of genuine relatability to Jamie. From his nuanced relationship with Tyler to the bond he eventually forms with Diane over kindred grief and hardships, the character remains well-rounded and multi-faceted in realistic ways. Consequently, despite their fictionality, both protagonists retain a level of realism.
Miss You, Love You Explores the Theme of Grief With Authenticity
‘Miss You, Love You’ centers around the heavy, universally understood, and complex theme of grief. Diane’s experience with losing her husband is harrowing and heartbreaking, and provides a more obvious source of her anguish. However, another sense of loss is felt in her character through her estranged relationship with her son, Tyler. Likewise, Jamie’s own convoluted relationship with his boss creates another layer of resentment and sorrow. Consequently, even without being physically present in the narrative, Tyler, and more importantly, his absence, ends up creating fertile ground for nuanced explorations of love, loss, and grief.
In a conversation about the same, Jim Rash shared his approach to the film’s thematic nucleus and said, “My approach to grief in this particular thing was also to layer in for these characters, it’s a grief of obviously a loss of life, but there’s grief and pining for someone. Love that’s not there anymore. A person’s not there anymore. A son that is no longer the same. And then I wanted to shade in this resentment theme, the harboring that we need them here-type philosophy. Or, selfishly, we want them or need them in our lives. I like that element to grief, where you’re angry at them for not being with you, even though that’s not possibly in their control.”
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