On paper, it looks dreadful. A Diane Sawyer interview with the second wife of a beloved actor who has a life-changing disease, timed to coincide with the launch of said wife’s book about her experiences as a carer. Pass the bucket, give me strength and have some dignity are just some of the instinctive responses.
So it is with trepidation verging on dread that one approaches Emma and Bruce Willis: The Unexpected Journey – A Diane Sawyer Special. But, much like the other recent potential schmaltzfest My Mom Jayne (Mariska Hargitay’s film about her mother, Jayne Mansfield, who died in a car crash when Hargitay was three), it turns out unexpectedly well. Yes, Sawyer does not help. She is the doyenne of the sympathetic/emetic head tilt and master of the pained expression. Her furrowed brow invites us to imagine she is being forced at gunpoint to ask the intimate questions her producers and the lowest common denominator demand, and her self-penned scripts are inexcusable. “His quiet dream girl shared his working-class values though they were from wildly different backgrounds,” she intones softly over photos and footage of the film star and his soon-to-be fiancee, Emma Heming, from their early days together, “before the joyful ride began”. Alas: “No one in life knows when there is a shadow about to creep in.”
