Love And Diane Analysis

Synopsis

Love & Diane tells the epic story of a family over three generations. At its heart lies the highly charged relationship between a mother and daughter, desperate for love and forgiveness but caught in a devastating cycle. For Love, the world changed forever when she and her siblings were torn from their mother, Diane. Separated from her family and thrust into a terrifying world of institutions and foster homes, the memory of that moment is more vivid to her than her present life.

Ten years have passed since that day and Love and her five siblings have been reunited with their mother. But all have been changed by the years of separation. They are almost strangers to each other and Love is tormented by the thought that it was her fault. At 8 years old she was the one who revealed to a teacher that her mother was an drug addict. Now she is 18 and HIV+. And she has just given birth to a son, Donyaeh. For Love & Diane this baby represents everything good and hopeful for the future. But that hope is mixed with fear. Donyaeh has been born with the HIV virus and months must pass before his final status is known. As Diane struggles to make her family whole
again and to realize some of her own dreams, Love seems to be drifting further and further away from her child. Diane, torn by her own guilt over her children's fate when she was an addict, tries to help and to care for her grandson. But when Diane confides her fears for her daughter to a therapist, the police suddenly appear at the door. Donyaeh is taken from Love's arms and it seems to the family as if history has repeated itself.

Now Love must face the same ordeal her mother had faced years before. She is charged with neglect and must prove to a world of social workers, therapists and prosecutors that she is a fit mother. And Diane must find the courage to turn away from her guilt and grasp a chance to pursue her long-deferred dreams. While the film takes us deep into the life of a single family, it also offers a provocative look at the Byzantine "system" that aims to help but as often frustrates the family's attempts to improve their situation. The film differs from many documentaries that deal with the problems facing poor communities in that it eschews "talking heads" and interviews with "experts" and aims instead to immerse the viewer in the experiences and thoughts of a family trying to survive and retain autonomy in the face of terrible challenges.

Love & Diane: Inner-City Blues: An Interview with Jennifer Dworkin

For over eight years Jennifer Dworkin documented the personal struggles of a recovering crack addict and her troubled daughter in Love & Diane. Fellow "long-term" filmmaker Steve James talks with Dworkin about her epic work of American v'rit' filmmaking.

I first heard about Jennifer Dworkin's Love & Diane when it played at the 2002 New York Film Festival. Though I missed seeing it because I live in Chicago, the word was that this was a special film, one in which the filmmaker spent years intimately following the lives of a family. Since that's been my own filmmaking "M.O.," I knew this was a documentary I had to see.

So in November, when I finally did settle into my seat at Amsterdam's International Documentary Festival to watch the film, I had pretty high expectations. Love & Diane lived up to them and more. It's a powerful, uncompromising, yet compassionate portrait of a mother and daughter coping with a hard life in Brooklyn and an even more difficult personal history between them. In the best sense of the word, the film is a throwback to the heyday of cinema v'rit' filmmaking in the '60s and early '70s,

When the Maysles were in their prime and young filmmakers like Barbara Kopple were making their mark.

Love & Diane is one of those films where the filmmaker earned such intimate access and the trust of her subjects that it gives viewers a rare and complex glimpse into the lives of people we rarely really see in films. And like most great film subjects, Diane Hazzard and her daughter, Love, continually confound our expectations of what it means to be a "ghetto mom" or an "ex-crack addict" or a "black teenage mother."

Meeting and getting to know the director, Jennifer Dworkin, was one of the pleasures of the Amsterdam festival. My film, Stevie, also played there, and Jennifer and I found unexpected common ground in the stories each of our films tells. Both films deal with troubled family history, struggles between a parent and child, foster care, poverty and the social service and legal systems. Yet, in other ways, Stevie and Love & Diane, couldn't be more different.

Filmmaker gave me a chance to talk further with Jennifer about her impressive first film and compare notes about how we each went about making such demanding and challenging films.

Steve James: How long did you spend on this film?

Jennifer Dworkin: You know, I never answer that question.

James: Really?

Dworkin: No, just kidding [laughs]. If you count directions I started but didn't end up using in the film, about eight years, including editing. But not full time.

James: Of course not. How could one survive?

Dworkin: Exactly.

James: When you started this, did you have any idea that you were in for such a long haul?

Dworkin: Not at all. When I started, I wasn't even sure I was making a film for anyone rather than myself and the people in it. I didn't think of it as something that I would try to turn into a "professional documentary." It stemmed from a class I was teaching, a filmmaking and photography class with children in a homeless shelter, and some of these children were Diane's nephews and nieces. So I started to make this film about growing up in the shelter system, with four families who I intended to follow, and then I narrowed it down to one family. When I met Love and Diane, I essentially ditched the original members of the family and focused on them.

James: What made you so sure that you wanted to focus on Love and Diane versus your original subjects?

Dworkin: I just found Love and Diane so impressive and exceptionally able to express what was going on in their lives; I thought they were fascinating and unique people. But beyond that there was another concern: over the years I had ended up personally involved in the lives of these other children. One of them came to live with me, and another was adopted by friends of mine. My original impulse had been to try to make a film that gave some insight into why so many children with so much promise were not fulfilling their potential, and I didn't really want it to be a film about how I was changing that in these cases.

James: So when you originally began, you didn't expect t to become a film in the sense that it has become a film, but clearly it doesn't sound like it was just going to be a home movie for the family either.

Dworkin: I don't think I was thinking very clearly when I started it. I didn't really have any idea what it took to make a documentary. When I was working at the shelter, it was partly a project for me, but it was partly a project for the children in it - sort of a joint project.

James: Like an activity?

Dworkin: Exactly, an activity. And some of the black-and-white footage shot by the children from those classes is still in the film.

James: When did you decide to not use music? Was that a decision you made from the start?

Dworkin: I never thought that music would be a great idea. But my editor and I were trying to keep a sort of open mind about it, and we did try to have some music composed for [the film]. But every time we put it on a scene, we found ourselves not pleased with it. It didn't help the film. I think that the music works well in Stevie. In our case, we really wanted to immerse people in a certain experience, and I think that music can make people aware that they're watching a film.

James: Well, it was interesting in Stevie, because I also wrestled with the idea of whether to have music or not. Early on I was very sure that there would be no [score]. I wanted this story to be as completely honest a film experience for the viewer as I could make it in every respect.

Dworkin: What made you change your mind?

James: I actually held the line for a long time. When my co-editor, Bill Haugse, entered the picture later in the process, he was an advocate of putting music in, and I found myself feeling like this was a very, very tough story to ask people to watch to begin with. I felt like when I started to put some music to it, it gave the viewer a bit of a way in to these characters.

Dworkin: That's interesting, because I also thought that music would make my film more accessible- sort of friendlier. And maybe I was being doctrinaire in a way, but I didn't mind that the film was going to be a tough experience for people. I kind of wanted that. Maybe it's because it's my first film and I didn't realize all the commercial problems it would cause later.

James: When I watched your film and noticed early on that you weren't using music and assumed rightly that you were not going to use music for the rest of the movie, I had this pang of regret that I had put music in [Stevie]. But then, by the end of the film, I felt like, and maybe it was just rationalization, I had actually made the right decision on Stevie and you had absolutely made the right decision.

Dworkin: That's interesting, because I was going to ask you if you would have put music into my film.

James: I might have fallen prey to it, but I think that would have been the wrong decision. I think you made the right decision. There is rawness in a very good sense to your film - the grittiness of the environment, the way it's shot. And the character of Diane, as the film progresses, is such a warm and great person that you want the absolute best for her. You have no mixed feelings about her as a subject in the film.

Dworkin: Not everybody feels that way about Diane, although most people do. There are people who find both Love and Diane incredibly frustrating. I mean, Love is obviously frustrating in the sense that you see her make bad decision after bad decision, and self-destructive thing after self-destructive thing, and you kind of wish you could just shake her, get her to stop feeling so sorry for herself, and stop blaming other people. Although she does grow up during the film, it's a very slow process. Her growth is more internal. She realized that in certain ways she has made the same mistakes as her mother, and she's going to have to forgive her mother. I never expected that the story with Diane would end so happily. It was a gift for us. At a Q&A at Sundance, somebody said, "I don't understand how you could make this film, because if Diane hadn't broken out and had this great success at the end, you would have wasted four years of your life!" I tried to explain that I would have had a film anyway.

James: This whole notion of not anticipating what's going to happen, what twists the story will take, is what makes this long-term filmmaking we do so interesting. As close as you get to your subjects, they continue to surprise you.

Dworkin: That's right. When I decided to focus on Love and Diane, the way I really saw it was in terms of this terrible thing that happened in the past to Diane - her addiction, her leaving her children - which was then resolved with the children's return home. The story was going to be about how they come together as a family, how love moves forward into the future and maybe fulfills some of her dreams. I didn't expect that much to change in Diane's life, and I didn't expect that much to stay the same in Love's life. What was so extraordinary is that [the film] unfolded almost like a tragedy. Love wasn't even pregnant when I stated to film. Then she had this baby and found herself basically reliving her mother's experience. The course of events seemed in some ways completely unexpected and in other ways inevitable.

James: Like fate.

Dworkin: Yeah.

James: Did you ever feel an impulse to try to influence Love in particular during that time?

Dworkin: I did. I mean, I didn't start the film with any sense of how a documentary filmmaker behaves. I didn't have any kind of code of involvement or non-involvement. I guess inevitably, I got very personally drawn in. I was constantly trying to give Love advice, but she ignored it. I could talk until I was blue in the face, and she was going to do what she was going to do.

James: Which is of course not surprising at all when you see the movie, because you see that she's ignoring advice from everybody, from her lawyer to her unseen psychologist or psychiatrist, to her mother, to her boyfriend. Yet, she is really interesting because of the amount of insight she has.

Dworkin: Love is extremely intelligent. I mean, she's very, very bright, and this has enormous potential as a writer. But there is something about her, and I don't know whether this is some particular syndrome or something, but she makes very sensible plans and has extremely good intentions, but somewhere between the decision and the action, there's some kind of failure. She really does feel sort of fated in a certain way. It's almost like she can't start to see herself a successful or competent person because something gets in the way of that thought or that perception of herself.

James: Was there a time when [Love & Diane] began to look at you differently during the course of making the film?

Dworkin: Yes. They did wonder why I was doing this and what I wanted to get out of it. We talked about it frequently. I used to sit us all down and have little meetings to talk about it, which nobody was ever terribly interested in doing. In fact, I made a ritual of handing out releases a couple of times a year so that I could talk to everyone about whether they were still onboard and why.

James: Getting people to re-sign releases is the most dangerous of things. Most [documentary filmmakers] get [the subjects] to sign once and then breathe a sigh of relief.

Dworkin: I made a little ritual out of it. I really don't know if they ever really understood why I was [making the film]. I think that what was good was that Love and Diane had reasons why they wanted to do it.

James: Which were?

Dworkin: Love at the beginning wanted to do it because she wanted to inspire other teenagers and she wanted to show that despite this very rough past, she was still going to be successful. Diane really just wanted a memorial to a destroyed life - her life and her family, all of whom were dead except for her kids. At 43, she'd lived longer than anyone else in her family, and she just wanted a record of her past and why she had done what she had done.

James: And by the end, the two of them flipped positions.

Dworkin: Diane was incredibly gung-ho about how she had transformed her life and how other people should see how it was never too late; she was empowered by the film. I think it became harder for Love to see a reason other than that - which is something that I think comes through quite powerfully in the film - her enormous commitment to truthfulness, regardless of the consequences. She never asked me to not film things that were painful for her, or not to show them, because she wanted it to be an honest film.

James: Were there times when you decided for her that you shouldn't film certain things?

Dworkin: Yes. And there were times in the editing room when we decided that certain things crossed some line of discretion. You know, the painful scenes that we kept and that remain in the film, those really were scenes that were about what became the central theme in the film, about guilt and forgiveness, about the mother-daughter dynamic. There were plenty of painful moments that were not relevant to that that we didn't include. And there was a very big debate about one issue in particular which is in the film. Though it was something that Love wanted to be included, we just didn't know where as filmmakers Mona [Davis] and I stood on it, which was Love's accusation that her brother had molested her when they were both children. It was a very, very tough decision because we knew that nobody else in the film believed it. They felt adamantly that it wasn't true. And [Love] said, "they say I'm the black sheep, then I have a right to say how I came to be this way." In the end, we kept it.

James: I think that it's always an interesting question. Usually people think that the reverse situation is going to happen, that the callous and cutthroat filmmaker wants to put everything that's juicy into the film and has to talk the subjects into it.

Dworkin: Did that happen with Stevie?

James: Well, there were things that Stevie did or said that reflected even worse on him that I left out of the film. You see plenty of Stevie's bad behavior in the film, but in some of the earlier cuts it felt like we were just rubbing the audience's nose in that part of who he was.

Dworkin: We had exactly the same issues that we wanted to balance. I think both of us came on the scene in moments of crisis, and in order to give a fair picture of how people are overall, you can't just show those moments of anger and fear, even if you do have a lot of that material. It's more responsible to try, in the editing room, to make sure your character is one the audience can feel the same way about as you do.

James: Looking back, what would you do differently in the film, or is it just perfect?

Dworkin: Uh, no, there's so many of them it's hard to know where to begin.
One thing is, I would have committed myself to making this film as a full-time occupation earlier, so that I was around more. I missed some very crucial moments. For instance, when they come to take the children, even though I probably wouldn't have been allowed to film, I wasn't even in New York. By the end of the film, I became very interested in shooting things well and getting clean sound and a nice picture. I learned stuff [while making the film] so that its technical quality improves radically as it progresses. There are a lot of things I could have done better. In terms of overall editing decisions, I'm happy with the editing - it's more the way I shot it. There are just moments that I would have liked to have been there
for.

James: On Hoop Dreams, the first two years of shooting, we only shot like 25 days total.

Dworkin: I didn't realize that at all.

James: And then it grew exponentially. The reason we shot so little the first two years is because we had no money, we had to work and it was before the age of cheap DV cameras. To get a camera package was expensive. We had so little money and didn't have the time to invest in the story like we were able to as it progressed. By the time of junior year, we shot like 45 or 50 days, and by senior year we shot like100 days. And if you look at the film, the first 40 minutes of Hoop Dreams cover the first two years of their high school years, and I'm sure people watching it think, oh, this is going to be a nice short, punchy film. But then it expands as it goes. And when we got into editing, there were certainly enough times when I felt in cutting, "God, I wish we'd had this." We missed some very major things because of how limited our shooting was. But overall though, it was a blessing to not have all those choices, because I think there are certain avenues that get closed off to you when you don't have everything. Just imagine how long Hoop Dreams, and Love & Diane and Stevie, would be if we had shot everything!

Did you think about including yourself in the film in some way, either off screen as a more definable presence or onscreen?

Dworkin: To be honest, the hidden reason, though certainly not the obvious reason, is that I would hate to be in a film.

James: Well, I didn't want to be in one either.

Dworkin: You look uncomfortable, too. The occasional shots we did when I was thinking of being the film were just hilarious because I look so incredibly uncomfortable and freaked out. I'm just kind of lurking in the corner with this look of panic on my face. But I did think about it a lot. We were putting audiences in front of a world that might seem alien to them, and one answer to that [challenge] is to give them a guide. And who better than the filmmaker, who is sort of an obvious intermediary figure between the work in the film and the world of many members of the audience? But I wasn't involved centrally in the way that I think you were in Stevie's story. The relationship between you and Stevie was a significant one that explained what you were doing there. In my case, the really central relationship was between Love and Diane, and in that relationship I was completely extraneous.

The other thing is, I decided quite early on not to interview the authorities, lawyers, social workers - not to get another point of view but to try to immerse people in the point of view of people in the film. And I thought [my presence] would have detracted from that. In Stevie though, one of the things that [the film] seems to me to be about is the ways in which a filmmaker has to navigate different worlds as a friend, as a documenter, and as someone trying to make something that people want to see. It's the only time I've seen a filmmaker really explore that.

James: I think you are right that that was part of the intent as the film evolved, but I think it's also a barrier to some people. The press and fellow documentary filmmakers really plug into that very thing you're talking about and engage with the film on that level. But then there are other people who react to the film and say: "Who does [Steve James] think he is that we care at all about his feelings! Can't he just remove himself from [the film] and tell a story?" Or they react to the whole thing as if it's a freak show, and it makes them uncomfortable because that whole voyeuristic question that is at the heart of this kind of filmmaking -that you are a voyeur in the lives of people in turmoil -is put in your face in Stevie. And I think that's not to a bad thing for [audiences] to have to think about. Your film in many ways is a throwback to v'rit' films. And I mean it as a total compliment, because some of the most powerful, potent and influential documentaries I ever saw were the films made back in the '60s and '70s -Harlan County, U.S.A, the Maysles Brother's films.

Dworkin: I admire those films very much.

James: It's clear from seeing your film. I have to ask this question because I know people want to know: what have the reactions been on the part of the subjects to seeing the film?

Dworkin: It was something that we were both avoiding. Both Diane and Love never asked to see it, and I never wanted to show it to them. But then at the New York Film Festival, I knew they were going to be there, and I had to show it to them. I tried to do it in a very supportive environment. I had Diane come with one of her counselors and see it with me first. Her reaction was very surprising to me because the first thing she said was that she was extremely proud of me that I had made a real movie! She just went on and on about it. She said, "Oh, it's so well-edited, and I like the imagery in the memory sequences, that's just how I felt." She had noticed all these technical things and wanted to talk about them.

James: She was like a film critic.

Dworkin: She was, actually. I expected just from the editing point of view that [she] would point out that I had changed the order of certain events or made some cuts between people who weren't really in the same place. But no, it turned out that her main worries had been that I would not do justice to her story. She is very happy with the film, has invited everyone she knows to see it, and feel empowered by it. Love came and saw it with Diane, and she basically has not said anything negative about it. I think she thinks that it is completely honest and fair. A couple of weeks later after seeing it, she called me and said, "I hadn't realized how angry I was. Was I really that angry?" She told me that she hadn't realized how incredibly difficult her mother's life had been, that there were things that she saw in the film that she hadn't really focused on about her mother. And everyone else who has seen it has been fine with it too.

James: It's interesting how a film like this can be therapeutic both in the act of making for the people in the film, but also in the act of seeing it when it's done. You want to hope that when people are seeing their story can see past the details to the larger truth.

Dworkin: I think everybody felt that the case for their positions had been fairly made, and I think part of what gave them that impression were the memory sequences where we allowed them to talk and use their own words. [These sequences are] important part of the film, and are one way in which it is not a traditional v'rit' film.

James: And do you have any new projects coming up?

Dworkin: I have one that I'm trying to develop which is about a very different subject. I'm hoping to make a film with a v'rit' insight about someone who produces television in Hollywood. I'm very interested in doing fiction filmmaking some time in the future. I don't see a huge divide between a documentary and narrative. I think that many of the things that make a good documentary are integral to making a good fiction film. As far as documentary, my allegiance to v'rit' is pretty strong. I can see myself doing other projects to help pay the bills that are more news-oriented, but I would always like to have, hopefully not quite so long-term, a v'rit' project at some level of development.

James: I'm glad to hear that, because the v'rit' tradition is oddly, in my mind, in jeopardy. It's been taken over by reality television.

Dworkin: I think that's right. What people are finding now is that the most exciting thing in documentary is films that are driven by the character of the director. Not just Michael Moore, but quite a few films in which the director is the investigative figure. I find those films interesting and very engaging, but they don't open up a window into an unknown world.

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NEW YORK TIMES

ARTS & IDEAS/CULTURAL DESK

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; The Catch-22's of Recovery
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Jennifer Dworkin's compelling documentary Love & Diane immerses you so intensely in the problems of the Hazzards, a troubled New York family living on public assistance, that by the end of its two and a half hours you feel almost like a member of the household.

This profoundly intimate movie, one of the finds of this year's New York Film Festival (it will be shown this morning), focuses on the stormy relationship of Diane, the family's 42-year-old matriarch, who is in recovery from crack addiction, and one of her daughters, Love, the single mother of a baby boy named Donyaeh. Donyaeh, a bright, happy child, was born H.I.V.-positive but converts to negative after treatment.

Love, who is 18 as the movie begins, is H.I.V.-positive but asymptomatic for AIDS and has a steady boyfriend who remains peripheral in the film.

Diane is a brave, outspoken woman with a horrendous family history. Now clean and sober and fortified by her Christian faith, she is determined to get a job and reunite under one roof with her family, which has been taken from her and scattered among foster homes. When she enrolls in a rigorous training program to help adults with troubled backgrounds and no job experience to enter the labor force, you passionately root for her to succeed.

An early scene, in which Diane gathers the family in prayer in her new apartment, suggests that her dreams may be within reach. But things quickly come apart. One son, Willie, leaves home and is lost to the streets. The painful turning point of a story that spans several years comes when Diane feels obliged to report Love as a neglectful mother, and Donyaeh is put in a foster home.

Without indicting New York's social service system, ''Love & Diane'' recognizes the frustrations of being dependent on that system with its Byzantine rules and Catch-22 provisions. Diane, for instance, can afford her roomy new apartment only so long as Donyaeh is living under her roof.

Her reporting of her daughter's neglect is a sad case of the tables turning, for when Love was 8, she reported her mother's crack addiction. The family was broken up, and Love, who still roils with resentment at Diane's neglect, endured a series of foster and group homes. After Donyaeh's departure, Love spends the rest of the movie trying to get her son back. But because she is prone to violent rages and listless depressions and fails to show up at court-mandated therapy sessions, her progress is touch-and-go.

What lifts the film above many other high-minded documentaries dealing with poverty and the welfare cycle is the filmmaker's astounding empathy for both Diane and Love. These smart, complicated women are never made to seem like case studies. As they grope their way toward a tentative peace, you feel how deeply their wounds run and understand with an uncomfortable clarity how fear and anger can sometimes undermine the noblest resolutions.

Love & Diane

Produced and directed by Jennifer Dworkin; director of photography, Tsuyoshi Kimoto; edited by Mona Davis. Running time: 155 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown today at 11 a.m. at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, as part of the 40th New York Film Festival.

Published: 10 - 12 - 2002 , Late Edition - Final , Section B , Column 1 , Page 9

VARIETY

Love & Diane

Jennifer Dworkin's epic 2-hour docu explodes the right wing clich' of the "welfare queen" -- the black woman with a lot of kids and a crack habit -- not by avoiding the stereotype but by fleshing it out. Settling the viewer in to an unmediated intimacy with her subjects, Dworkin follows the fortunes of Diane, recovering addict and mother of six, and her daughter Love over a span of three years. Prizewinner at Locarno, pic's tremendous emotional force and uncompromising honesty make for a strong presence on the fest circuit, and limited theatrical run could precede eventual PBS airing.

"Love" starts three years after Diane has succeeded in reuniting her damaged family, traumatized first by her neglect and then, after the law interceded, by separation, foster care and group homes. In the intervening years, they have become strangers. They fantasized a "happily ever after" ending once they reconnected, but deep-rooted scars and resentments remain.

Dworkin focuses on the most intense of these familial relationships, the mother/daughter duo of the title. Love, emerging from a horrendous hand-to-mouth existence on the streets but still seeking a bond with her mother, is HIV positive. She has just given birth to a boy, Donyaeh, similarly afflicted.

As characters' histories are revealed, patterns emerge that threaten to engulf the principals in a hellish repetitive cycle. Diane is herself the daughter of an alcoholic mother who abandoned her when she was 3 years old. Love, who was removed from her mother when she was 8, sees her baby wrested from her and, like her mother before her, must surmount all manner of court-mandated obstacles to retrieve him.

Both Diane and Love had babies very young to fill the void created by their absent parents only to become absent parents themselves. Love feels like a pariah because it was she who, at age 8, told her teacher that her mother smoked crack, leading to the initial break-up of the family unit. Similarly, it is Diane's mention to her therapist of a violent fight between Love and one of her sisters that leads to Love's son Donyaeh's being taken away.

No mere collection of talking heads, film's p.o.v. subtly alternates between that of a privileged onlooker and that of a distanced observer so that Diane's triumphant graduation from her job-training course is captured by lenser Tsuyoshi Kimoto in lively hand-held close-up while Donyaeh's return home is framed in a long-shot tableau from the next room. Impressionistic imagery, often shot in dreamy, soft-focus black-and-white, accompanies voice-over monologues wherein Diane recounts her addiction or Love her time on the streets.

It could be argued that the presence of the camera gooses the women to greater efforts than they might otherwise have expended, but it soon becomes apparent that, being on public assistance, they already exist under far less benign surveillance, and are continually reported upon and judged.

Dworkin's camera becomes a kind of friendly witness, recording a supervised visit between mother and baby or a meeting with a lawyer or the aftermath of a crisis. At other times, the camera wanders restlessly as couples fight in their separate corners or mother and daughter hammer out a fragile truce.

Haunting the whole family is the specter of Charles, the eldest son who kept his siblings fed and functioning when their mother couldn't, and who had three years of college under his belt when he blew his brains out. Both Diane and Love, unsurprisingly, are diagnosed as clinically depressed. In the face of this legacy, the fact that they keep striving seems amazing. That they often succeed seems semi-miraculous.

The confluence of relatively inexpensive video stock and the all-important precedent of "Hoop Dreams" have led to the opportunity to follow a sweeping story in depth and through time. Dworkin brilliantly uses the form to involve the viewer in a warts-and-all complexity that confounds facile judgment, while recreating the frustrating slowness of a system of social services that often nurtures the very ills it attempts to cure.

THE VILLAGE VOICE

Schools of Hard Knocks by J. HOBERMAN

Few impulses in movie reviewing are stronger than the desire to pat the back of a worthy project. No surprise then that Jennifer Dworkin's years-in-the-making 2 1/2-hour portrait of a former crack addict and her HIV-positive teenage daughter inspired enthusiastic accolades on its New York Film Festival premiere; what's more remarkable is how much Love & Diane deserved them.

Can you be persuaded to see for yourself? From first shot to last, Dworkin's movie is a continuously absorbing, sometimes revelatory, frequently moving experience; as documentary filmmaking it's not only amazingly intimate but also characterized by an unexpected lyricism.

Dworkin evidently knew her subjects for some years before she began documenting their lives. The movie begins at the point where fortysomething Diane has managed to regain custody of her five surviving children and Love, the eldest of these, has just had her first baby, Donyaeh. That the infant was born HIV-positive is not unmitigated tragedy; his condition enhances the family's public assistance grant and enables them to leave East New York for a better apartment in Flatbush. The birth of the baby also allows Dworkin an emotional recapitulation of the family's history. When the generally upbeat Diane's grandmaternal instinct kicks in, Love becomes wildly jealous of little Donyaeh. Love's sense of deprivation is existential. She spent years in foster care, lived on the streets, and still feels guilty that, at age eight, she told school authorities that her mother was smoking crack.

The relationship between the two women deteriorates; Love neglects Donyaeh and rages at Diane. Diane loses control and calls child welfare. Donyaeh winds up in foster care. (Too late, Diane wonders how they will pay the rent without custody of the child.) Love manages to get herself a lawyer to help get Donyaeh back. Thus, the family's internal dynamics are intimately bound up in the workings of the social welfare bureaucracy and subject to the rulings of family court. The ubiquitous presence of the filmmaker is but another aspect of the surveillance system.

Having prevailed over her own family history of alcoholism and abandonment, Diane is both articulate and self-aware in explaining her life; Love, who is very much her mother's daughter, uses the movie to vent a boundless anger. Her looks keep changing; her moods swing and her weight fluctuates. To a large degree, this is the drama of her struggle with self-knowledge against a complex backstory of abuse, violence, and neglect. In some respects, Love & Diane is an extreme example of a universal situation: Love blames her mother for her condition, refusing to accept responsibility. She resists her therapy, stubbornly clutching her symptoms. (At the same time, she is no less determined in her quest to regain Donyaeh.)

Throughout, Dworkin intersperses interviews and observational scenes with shards of Super-8 subjectivity - footage either shot by the principals or narrated by them. The opening image of a car windshield in the rain, accompanied by Diane's autobiographical voice-over, suggests that heaven itself is weeping. Rooted as it is in a specific milieu, the film has a cosmic aspect: Love recapitulates Diane's life. The passage of time is measured by Donyaeh's development.

It's illuminating that Love & Diane would follow Steve James's comparable Stevie into Film Forum. Both documentaries are epic, highly personal enterprises in which the filmmakers were for years entwined, if not embedded, in the damaged lives of their subjects; both are examples of cinematic social work. The relatively privileged filmmakers expose and dramatize the pathology of poverty, the cost of ignorance, the ongoing generational patterns of abandonment and abuse. The procedural precedent for both movies is Hoop Dreams, a study of two high school basketball prospects, which James made as part of a three-man collective. But while Love & Diane is enormously engaging, Stevie is a disaster, which is not to say that some won't find it fascinating.

If the self-effacing Dworkin is barely in evidence, James makes his own conflicted relationship with his subject central. Brave or foolish, Stevie is thus burdened with the filmmaker's own neediness and guilt. Worse, Stevie appears to realize that the entire basis of his relationship with James is making this movie. His misery has made him a star. Where invisible Dworkin (whose surrogate is perhaps Love's indefatigable lawyer) chooses to show Love and Diane using her film as their means of recognition, James's less expressive, more pathetic subject seems only able to communicate his yearning for any sort of attention.

As Stevie has committed a serious crime, his fate is already sealed. The only possible atonement is the filmmaker's. By contrast, Love & Diane is a more open-ended enterprise. (Will Diane manage to get a job? Can Love handle motherhood? Therapy? Has she really forgiven Diane?) What's more, Dworkin's film feels like a collaborative enterprise; her subjects are the authors of their lives. The struggle for redemption is hardly an uncommon movie story, but Love & Diane redeems that clich' - an ongoing process.

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Welfare as they know it: Moving look at a N.Y. family
By JAMI BERNARD

The next time some idiot complains about "welfare queens," and lumps a whole segment of the population into one big stereotype, refer that individual to Jennifer Dworkin's amazing documentary "Love & Diane."

Dworkin followed a matriarchal African-American family over several years as it struggled with New York's social and family services. The family members tried desperately to break the cycle of dependence and subpar parenting, moving through a bureaucratic maze that often made things worse when it wasn't making things impossible.

Diane, in her 40s, is trying to make up for a drug-addled past when she abandoned her six children to the foster-care system. Now she's straight and has most of her semi-grown children back (her eldest committed suicide in his 20s), but they are all strangers to one another. There is no apartment in the city large enough, even if their subsidies could afford one, to contain the explosive emotions the reconciliation brings.

Love is one of Diane's children, now 18 and a new mother herself. Soon she, too, is repeating Mom's mistakes. She is so choked with anger, guilt and depression that she loses her baby to foster care and spends the remainder of this documentary trying to get him back.

The footage, free of talking-head experts, is mostly self-explanatory, and the fates of these family members are varied and surprising. It is bittersweet to note that behind every stereotype lurks an individual with a back story that would make all the difference if it was known. But there are only a finite number of filmmakers with the devotion, patience and ability to tease out these stories.

FILM CRITIC

Love and Diane
By NICHOLAS SCHAGER

Love and Diane, Jennifer Dworkin's astonishing documentary about a former crack addict's attempts to reunite her family, may be the most captivating film experience of the year. Tender and poignantly insightful, the film is a blessing for those who've found the most recent batch of documentaries either sweetly superficial (Winged Migration, Spellbound) or overbearingly narcissistic (Bowling for Columbine); that these lesser documentaries should even be mentioned in the same breath as Dworkin's film is itself something of a crime against this first-time director's absorbing masterpiece. At a swift 155 minutes, Love and Diane submerges us so deeply in the plight of its titular matriarch Diane Hazzard - who is endeavoring to reconnect with the children she lost to foster care six years earlier as a result of her drug-induced neglect - that one feels like it would be perfectly natural to walk up to her on the street and give her an affectionate hug. Dworkin makes us a part of this fractured family, and it is to her credit that she does so not with sermonizing meant to engender our sympathy, but through the unadorned intimacy of her camera's inquisitive eye.

The director spent years following Diane and her brood around Brooklyn, and the film's casual narrative encompasses two and a half years of the household's troubled existence. Diane has brought her five living children back under one roof - her eldest son Charles, with three years of college under his belt, committed suicide after finding his mother's habit and the chaotic home life that arose from it too much to bear - but has discovered that she hardly knows them. This is particularly the case with her 18-year-old daughter Love, who is HIV-positive and mother to a baby boy named Donyaeh, also infected with the disease. Love's years in foster and group homes have turned her into an angry, petulant child, desperate for love and comfort but quick to shut out the world when things seem too overwhelming. As a result of her baby's HIV status, Love is able to get a subsidy for public housing, allowing Diane and the kids to move into a larger apartment in Flatbush, and for a time it seems to Diane that life has finally gained some semblance of hope and normalcy. But Love's mothering skills are in short supply, and Diane's frustrations regarding her daughter's maternal negligence spill out during a therapy session. Soon, the cops have arrived to take Donyaeh into foster care custody while Love is charged with parental neglect, thus throwing not only the mother-daughter relationship into disarray, but also the family's housing situation.

That Love is perpetuating a cycle of abandonment - not only did Diane desert her kids, but she was raised by grandparents after her mother drank herself to death- is painfully obvious even to those enmeshed in this hellish pattern. Love is forced to navigate through the very foster care system she has loathed and resented for much of her life, meeting with lawyers, social workers, and therapists in an effort to get Donyaeh back from the boy's foster mother (a Hispanic woman who effusively dotes on the adorable tyke), and the film makes clear that this unwieldy social system frequently gives people like Love few opportunities to better their lot. Diane has been on welfare since the birth of her first child at 16 - in one of many candid moments, Diane (like Love later on) admits to having children because she thought they would bring her the affection she never had as a child - and she displays a sincere desire to take control of her life, dreaming of working as an office secretary. But as Love continues to skip the therapy appointments that are a vital means of proving to the court that her anger and depression have subsided, and as Diane begins to lose her grip on home and brood (including second son Willie, who has chosen to live a life of thievery on the streets), the tenuous stability of Diane and Love's relationship with each other begins to crumble, with Love's searing anger over her mother's failures a bridge not easily mended.

Dworkin's film benefits from the decision to intercut traditional on-the-spot footage of the family's daily life with more impressionistic black-and-white interludes of the city's landscape featuring voice-over interviews with Love and Diane, providing us with candid and perceptive first-person perspectives on the events unfolding onscreen. The director was given total access to their lives, and her nearly invisible camera repeatedly captures scraggly, unadulterated beauty in casual activities - Love and her boyfriend cheering on a dancing Donyaeh, Diane putting the final decorative touches on her new apartment. Dworkin's film is overflowing with empathy even as it refuses to shy away from the women's failings. Love is, and may continue to be, a sub-par mother, and Diane may not be ready or able to completely heal the rift between herself and her children. But if these two battered woman can continue to show each other just a small measure of the compassion, kindness, and respect that Dworkin exhibits for her subjects in the heartfelt, masterful Love and Diane, I have hope that they'll be able to overcome any obstacle in their path.

THE SUN

Capturing Resilience
By NATHAN LEE

"Love and Diane," the major discovery of last year's New York Film Festival, returns home today, and it's a cause for celebration. One of the Year's best films, Jennifer Dworkin's richly rewarding documentary offers the kind of deep engagement with humanity we ask of the movies and so rarely receive.

Culled from more than 400 hours of footage, the film portrays the passionate and complex relationship between two members of a poor African American family in Brooklyn: a recovered crack addict named Diane Hazzard and one of her daughters, the (at times) ironically named Love.

Love, 19 years old and HIV-positive, struggles with depression, self-destructive behavior, and the responsibility of raising her newborn son, a scene-stealing charmer named Donyaeh. Having survived her addiction and brought her family back together, Diane is determined to set her life on a new course. She enrolls in a vocational training program and maintains an uncompromising honesty with her children.

Patterns of neglect, betrayal, regret, and forgiveness structure an account of several years in these two women's lives. Primarily composed of v'rite footage, the film incorporates lyrical sequences accompanied by voiceover. No mere exercise in good medicine cinema, "Love and Diane" is an invigorating, rough-and-tumble, bracingly intimate examination of the heart.

It's a remarkable debut for Ms. Dworkin, a New York native, whose success on the film festival circuit was launched almost by accident when a preview tape of "Love and Diane" was added to a package requested by the extremely selective committee of the New York Film Festival. They turned down the requested work (by a major league festival favorite) and launched a wonderful New York film instead.

Ms. Dworkin grew up in England, but returned to the States to pursue philosophy studies at Cornell University. In the late 1980s, she ran a photography workshop for homeless children in Harlem, which evolved into a Super 8 film project. She became especially close to a girl named Selena - Diane Hazzard's niece. "Love and Diane" evolved unexpectedly from this relationship.

"I was already making a film about Selena," she explained to me recently. "One day I was planning to interview Diane about her, but she wasn't there: The house was empty. The only person there was Love. But I had a [cinematographer] and I had a camera, so I waited about an hour and then just thought: Why don't I interview Love? I'd never really talked to her. She'd been this very silent figure who looked very depressed and I thought, why bother her? But in the course of about two minutes I realized she was absolutely fascinating."

Soon Diane came in, and the mother and daughter started talking to each other. "Some of what they said is in the final film!" Ms. Dworkin says. "They immediately grasped the use of the interview and the camera as a forum for themselves. It's almost like I'd given them this space in which they could engage with each other, not so much with me."

At first, the film was conceived as a self-conscious collaboration, an opportunity for Love and Diane to shape and express their lives using the reflective medium of a documentary portrait for guidance. "We talked about the ways they saw people like themselves represented in the media," Ms. Dworkin says. "They expressed a lot of dissatisfaction with the phoniness and stereotypes, the whole ghetto clich'."

"Love wanted to be a writer, she still does. She thought that this would be a kind of test run of her autobiography, a way to help organize her future. For Diane, it was going to almost going to be a memorial to a finished life: about her past, about the death of all the other members of her family, all her siblings, and finally about the loss of her kids. Now she had them back and that was the end, a happy ending. Which is where the troubles in "Love and Diane" begin."

Love's casual neglect of Donyaeh, coupled with a violent episode of her quick temper, leads Diane to call her therapist for help. Her trust in authority backfires spectacularly: Donyaeh is taken away from Love, Diane's children are removed from the house, and a tortuous navigation of social-service regulations begins.

Ms. Dworkin's collaborative portrait soon became something very different, and "Love and Diane" emerged as an epic tale of individuals and their idiosyncratic behavior patterns colliding with the "system."

"The events that happened put them absolutely back in the past," elaborates Ms. Dworkin. "When Donyaeh and the other kids were taken it was really Diane's worst nightmare: The past emerging as this kind of completely inescapable fate, no matter what you do. It gave us the structure of the film -everybody was focused on issues of guilt and forgiveness- but obviously none of us expected that to happen."

While the setting and extremity of hardship chronicled in the film may be far removed from the lives of the educated art-house audience likely to see it, "Love and Diane's" galvanic drama of basic human fallibility and triumph transcends its specific context. Refusing to either objectify or simplify her subjects, Ms. Dworkin finds the universal in the particular, our own strength and weaknesses reflected in the lives of our neighbors.

But this terrific piece of fly-on-the wall cinema was,for the filmmaker,"the most incredibly manipulated, worked on, edited, and thought-about thing."

"[Cinematographer] Tsuyoshi Kimoto and I developed a working relationship that was so intuitive that we could read each other's body language- it was very fluid," she said. "There were times when I felt something big was coming up I would just leave the house and leave Tsuyoshi there. I would wander off to see what was happening in the other room. I needed to be far enough away so they wouldn't turn and talk to me."

Observation alters the observed in documentary filmmaking no less than in quantum physics, yet the family's familiarity with Ms. Dworkin - before a camera ever entered the situation - enabled the film to capture unusually private moments. "There is an element of stage management that goes on but I don't think our presence changed the fundamental order of events in any way. There were things that I'd have liked to have affected that I couldn't."

In fact, once their initial conception of the film's purpose slipped away into the tumult of daily life, the two women did not alter their behavior before the camera.

"Love is pretty much the way she is in the film," Ms. Dworkin says. "That defensiveness is always there, that lack of trust. You can break through it, and when you do she's very genuine. Love is very honest, sometimes too much so. Whenever she was offered a chance to soften something, or not put something out there, she would reject that; she would insist on it."

Diane, in her own way, is just as uncompromising. "She's an inspirational figure for many people," Ms. Dworkin says. "She changed her life in her forties from such an extraordinarily ruined, awful story, and yet she still has this joie de vivre and enthusiasm. She would describe it as faith.There's a core of optimism, of resilience."

And yet the two do change during the course of the film - especially Love. "I think she does mature in the film; she learns that she's going to have to reconsider what her mother did in light of the fact that she did the same thing," Ms. Dworkin says. "It's going to involve forgiving her mother and herself."

"For me the most amazing moment is when they're sitting on the bed and Diane says, 'You don't trust me'. The discussions that they get into with each other are very honest. They really want to tell the truth to each other."