Diane Keaton’s Shadows and Light

The critic David Thomson, in his outrageous, brilliant, poignant, and often very funny book “ The New Biographical Dictionary of Film ,” talks about how some stars radiate a kind of preternatural goodness, which, presumably, casts its own kind of light on the audience. Not the beautiful, shadowy doom that Montgomery Clift brought to the screen, for instance, or the troubled, mischievous sharpness that Jeffrey Wright and Regina Hall lend to their work, but something as warming as sunshine and just as seductive. And while Diane Keaton, who died on October 11th, at the age of seventy-nine, will be remembered for the charm of her attitude toward comedy— How did I, a nice-enough girl from Santa Ana, end up here? Why, and how, am I doing this? —it’s the essential goodness that characterizes