Diane Warren: Relentless
(USA, 91 min.)
Dir. Bess Kargman
“You have a big wall,” director Bess Kargman tells interviewee Diane Warren.
“I do?” the songwriter replies.
“And I’m trying to—”
“—to break it though?” Warren laughs. “Good luck. Get the sledgehammer.” Warren buttons her blazer, having firmly won the conversation while keeping her defenses intact behind a wall of humour.
Diane Warren: Relentless offers an engaging spin on the music doc as it looks at the life and career of a woman who wrote many of the hits that topped the charts, made movie magic, and pulled on heartstrings for years. Too few documentaries provide insight into the idiosyncrasies of below the line talents, but few of such figures have the level of celebrity that might easily inspire a doc like Warren does.
She’s a superstar songwriter responsible for a catalogue of massive hits. Warren’s catalogue includes Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time,” LeAnn Rhimes’ “How Do I Live,” Céline Dion’s “Because You Loved Me,” and Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing,” among many others. She’s the queen of the power ballad with a signature cocktail of pizzazz and cheese. And she’s the most nominated woman never to have won a competitive Oscar. That latter trivia partly accounts for her celebrity—and it provides some of the most unexpected moments as Kargman follows Warren on her relentless pursuit of an Academy Award.
Despite her guardedness, Warren proves a very good documentary subject. She’s a big personality and a great talker, even though she’s perfectly comfortable directing Kargman to ask the next question.
Relentless charts Warren’s life story in conventional bio-doc fashion as she recounts her childhood. She tells of growing up in Van Nuys, California where her parents didn’t really understand her or support her. Warren remembers rebelling against her mom’s plans for her to be a schoolteacher. Her father, she notes, supported her musical inclinations—but advised her to listen to all the advice she could get. But her parents also hit back at her defiance, including hauling her off to the police department when they caught her with marijuana. She spent some time in juvenile detention as a result, which gives audiences a sense of the foundation for Warren’s wall.
The film quickly visits the hit parade of Warren’s career as a songwriter, which exploded before she was 30 after a few years of relentless efforts and rejections. Her first big hit, she recalls, was DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night.” However, Warren and her colleagues explain that the then-29-year-old songwriter signed a paltry contract for $200 a week with no publishing revenue for her work. She and her lawyer did the math and ultimately broke her contract with publisher Jack White. But that suit, Warren explains, meant that she couldn’t sign with anyone else, so she decided to self-publish her music and never looked back. Her catalogue, the film notes, now has a value of nearly half a billion dollars.
“At the end of the day, we made a deal,” White tells Kargman. “Without me, there would be no Diane Warren. I’m the one who discovered her.”
This fight for self-worth fuels much of Warren’s music if one listens closely. Her feel-good and affirmative lyrics inevitably account for the enduring success of her songs.
Relentless tours though Warren’s chart-toppers with a who’s who of celebrity interviews. Stars like Cher, Gloria Estefan, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Hudson, and Randy Jackson consider Warren’s efforts to get them to sing her songs. The exhaustive range of celebrities here speaks to the reach of Warren’s oeuvre and the demand for it. Cher’s account of “If I Could Turn Back Time” is especially funny. She admits that she hated the song after hearing the demo that Warren recorded herself. But as soon as Cher stepped behind the microphone, Warren recalls, she flipped the songwriter the bird after realising she was right.
Other highlights explore Warren’s titular relentlessness. Interviewees share how Warren will do anything to get her preferred artist to record a song, even double-booking people like she did with LeAnne Rhimes and Trisha Yearwood with the banger “How Do I Live” with both versions released the same day. Rhimes appears in the film and seems happy with how it all worked out in the end, noting that everyone involved bickered all the way to the bank. (“How Do I Live?” was eventually ranked the best-charting single of the 1990s.)
The real meat of the film, and the best insight into Warren’s psychology, though, arises when she discusses the Oscars. With 15 nominations and no wins, Warren admits that there’s a sting. She has a Grammy, an Emmy, and a few Golden Globes, but the Oscar eludes her.
For Warren the closest she says she felt she came was her 2015 collaboration with Lady Gaga. Their song “Til It Happens to You” for the documentary The Hunting Ground offers an anthemic call of support for survivors of sexual assault. Warren tells Kargman how penning the song, and then campaigning for it, forced her to confront emotions she repressed after being assaulted as a child. The documentary shows clips of Warren baring her soul on the campaign trail, being overcome with emotion as Lady Gaga performs the song at the Oscars with a stage full of survivors, and then feeling completely gutted when she loses again.
Relentless, moreover, comes out as Oscar voting opens. Warren, shrewd campaigner that she is, is a dark horse once again. The timing, along with the view of her 2022 campaign for “Somehow You Do,” a seemingly out-of-nowhere nomination that spoke to her reach and esteem, offers rare and candid insight into the toll of the awards gamut. Few stars really open up about wanting the Oscar so badly. It’s the ultimate validation for a life of hard work. Warren reveals this sentiment later when she finally accept her honorary Oscar in 2022. She looks up and does her parents proud.
But the focus on Warren’s work and her trophy shelf adds to the conversation about the wall. For all the songs about love, Kargman gets Warren to admit that she’s never been in love. Even a segment of the film that deals with a nine-year relationship dances around the “L” word.
If anything, Warren’s biggest love is her cat Mouse. Her interactions with the old cat, a longtime companion, provides one of the film’s most emotional story arc. (These scenes are especially touching now knowing that Warren lost her home, and presumably many mementoes of Mouse, in the ongoing California fires.) It’s not that she’s incapable of love, but her guardedness almost demands that she ask other people to channel it through song.
Warren lets down the wall in Relentless. She just does so on her own terms.
