Diane Warren: Relentless (dir. Bess Kargman)
“You can’t retire from your life”, says Diane Warren and boy howdy is she not doing that. Even if Warren’s particular branch of music hasn’t quite continued to command the cultural and commercial pull of the first two decades of the career, lord knows she keeps plugging away.
The Bess Kargman documentary about the famed songwriter opens with a camera gliding down a long corridor and then through a doorway into her (very messy) workplace. All the way through, the walls are covered with framed film posters, magazine covers, and a mass of silver, gold and platinum records. So many, in fact, that there’s almost as many on the ground lined up against the waiting to find a place to hang as there are on the wall itself. We hear snippets from “Unbreak My Heart”, “Rhythm of the Night”, “How Do I Live” (the LeAnn Rimes version), “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” and “Because You Loved Me”.
Those songs, which are inarguably some of her biggest hits, highlight that shift in popular music that can so easily be charted in Diane Warren's career. And in Diane Warren: Relentless, we perhaps unsurprisingly focus on this career heyday period with the majority of her latter-day Oscar-nominated songs largely absent (barring a particularly touching moment devoted to “Til it Happens to You”, performed by Lady Gaga). Quite rightly, honestly. I’m sure Warren herself is the only person alive who could hum such songs as “Stand Up For Something”, “I’m Standing With You”, “The Fire Inside” from the Cheetos movie, or “The Journey” from just last year. To say nothing of the hundreds of other songs she writes for movies that don't get nominated for an Oscar.
It actually isn’t until 58 minutes in that the Oscars are even directly mentioned. And done through a dig at Randy Newman’s own drought-breaking win for Monsters, Inc. no less. Nevertheless, they linger over the narrative like a dark cloud. The attention that Relentless ultimately pays to it all—including most prominently the unenviable record of 16 nominations and zero wins, albeit with a career honorary award in 2022—narrows the achievements of its subject quite dramatically. While it’s true that she is synonymous with theme songs from movies, it’s almost amusing to consider how little attention is given to things like being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame or winning an Ivor Novello Award, two Golden Globe awards or a Grammy (for “Because You Loved Me”). Long before that 58-minute mark, the film becomes little more a feature-length for your consideration advertisement for the original song that inevitably arrives at the film’s conclusion. Performed by Kesha, "Dear Me" is probably better than that song from RBG and I'm sure it will be nominated and miss out on the win once more. She just keeps on plugging. That the film was quite randomly initially released in January, as far away from the 2025–26 Oscar season as you can get, likely doesn’t matter. Nor should it, but she exists in a cycle and it's all relevant.
It's just a shame that the documentary is so heavily weighted towards this idea of the Oscar as the thing that will finally give her professionally and personally credibility. Kargman, whose First Position I was a fan of in 2011, attempts valiantly to get to a version of the Diane Warren that we don’t get to see, but Warren is realistic about her life as a workaholic and so therefore isn't too accommodating. It’s reliant on friends and family to really get beyond the walls that she puts up and we're able to piece together the family and personal traumas that shaped how she sees the world and what fuels her writing. Which is why the times we get to luxuriate in that music is when it's at its strongest. It's at least smart enough to not even attempt to connect her troubled and rebellious childhood with writing stuff like "How Do I Live" from Con Air or "Can't Fight the Moonlight" from Coyote Ugly, which would never work. But hearing "Because You Love Me" from Up Close & Personal is about her father actually does work. Or connecting "Til it Happens to You" to her own history of sexual assault. The film needed more of this.
Even if Warren was adamant to keep the film side of her work front and centre, I wondered what did she actually think of all these movies she helped turn into pop culture landmarks? We hear that Cher hated "If I Could Turn Back Time" (a story they've both spoken about countless times), but did Diane Warren thrill at the thought of writing a song for Cher in Burlesque? I would like to think that she does, but the subject is never broached. She is informed that a song she wrote for Paloma Faith is going 'viral on TikTok' and that’s nice, I guess, but does that feel the same as going to number one with Brandy's "Have You Ever" at the height of the late '90s pop renaissance? I'd honestly like to know! How does she feel about the changes in the industry, particularly the role of the movie theme song in it? Considering her last top ten hit (apart from a Taylor Swift collaboration) was Faith Hill's song from Pearl Harbor, and that none of her subsequent Oscar-nominated songs even approached the pop charts, I'd think she had an opinion or two. So many questions! That we spend more time on her cat than we do on her (iconic!) collaborations with superstars like Celine Dion or huge hit songs is disappointing, although I guess I should admire its restraint to not devote time to her writing a song for Taylor Swift (we do get Beyonce, though). We don't even get an explanation for all the scarves, but we do learn about her farm animals. Which I just can't imagine all that many people who would sit down and watch a Diane Warren documentary are going to be keen for. If they were going to go to all of this effort just to lose another Oscar campaign to Sinners or Kpop Demon Hunters, they should have just gone full pop idol adulation for one of the greatest to have ever done it.
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