A few years ago, all I could talk about was a movie in which Diane Keaton gets addicted to meth. I’d pester friends and loved ones about it, needing them to see the sheer chaos I’d witnessed. “It’s on Prime Video right now! For free! Go watch it!” This was Breaking Through, a 2003 made-for-television film that saw Keaton play a struggling single mother who resorts to drug dealing to make ends meet. Before you know it, she’s jonesing after the hard stuff herself. Trust me: there is life before Breaking Through, and life after. I have never seen an Akira Kurosawa film, but I have seen Annie Hall lick the leftovers from an empty bag of crank.
Breaking Through is the kind of movie that can only be found today by rooting around the arse-end of Amazon, but it’s also one of the most significant films Keaton has ever made – a mortifying blueprint for the actor’s modern career. Call it the Flustered and Unhinged Diane Keaton Cinematic Universe, where up is down, down is up, and her dialogue has been replaced with yelps and confusion. Today the star of The Godfather and many of Woody Allen’s better ones seems to be endlessly frogmarched into surreal calamities so individually deranged that they sound made up.
