The sunny strip-mall mundanity of Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley is the fascinating setting for Eric Lin’s dark directorial debut, the unsettling and not entirely successful story of a widow struggling with her son’s mental illness. Based, very closely, on a series of real-life events that occurred in 2015 and were documented two years later by journalist Frank Shyong in the L.A. Times (be warned: the headline alone is one massive spoiler), Rosemead works better as a character study than it does as an issue movie about mental health. Though it takes a little while to get used to seeing Lucy Liu as a meek and humble mother, the film builds to a most unexpected crescendo, giving the actress her best role in years, one that could even get traction in awards season.
There is an obvious, instant comparison with Michelle Yeoh’s character in Everything Everywhere All at Once, casting a strong Asian star against type in a domestic setting. But with Irene Chao, what you see is exactly what you’re going to get; the Taiwanese owner-manageress of a slick, fluorescent-lit copy shop, struggling to keep her life together after the death of her husband. Her 17-year-old son Joe (Lawrence Shou), once a straight-A student, is starting to flunk his grades, and when we meet him, in a school exam, he is too checked-out even to bother cheating, scribbling blotchy black spiders on the test paper instead.
There is a certain comment here on the pressures felt by Asian students, but the real problem is Joe’s schizophrenia, which Irene finds difficulty accepting. Joe’s doctor at the community medical center tries to involve her in his therapy, and for a time she refuses (“Just because you have a Chinese face doesn’t mean you understand us,” she snaps in faltering English). Perhaps the bigger point Lin is trying to make is the matter of pride in the Asian diaspora, reflected in Irene’s attempts to brush Joe’s problems under the carpet and telling her friends that his visits to the shrink are, in fact, due of his interest in psychiatry. Joe would be a handful enough at any time, but Irene’s cancer has returned, and the experimental treatment she’s getting is a long shot at best.
The stakes increase with radio reports of a school shooting in North Carolina, and Irene’s first instinct is to change channels (“We don’t need to think about these things,” she tells Joe, switching to some frothy jazz-pop). But it stirs something in Joe, and Irene sees it, as do we when he flips out at school during an active-shooter drill. Joe, we learn, has not been taking his meds (“Their pills dull my vigilance. No more!” he writes in his online journal). His friend Jeannie (Madison Hu) finds a disturbing hand-drawn map of the school, while Irene notes a preponderance of violent criminals in his search history, from Sandy Hook to Aurora. Ominously, there is no tangible sense of a plan. Yet…
The biggest drawback with Lin’s film is in its attempts to find a visual language for Joe’s psychotic episodes, which tend to be literal in the extreme and break up the steady pace of the drama. The better part of Rosemead is what goes unsaid and unshown; when Joe turns 18, Irene will no longer be his guardian, and the amorphous, bloody horrors of what he might do when she’s no longer there to stop him is a key part of the story. Once again, Irene is driven by the shame of it and feels only guilt (“Did I do something wrong?” she wonders aloud).
Lin, working with screenwriter Marilyn Fu, handles this with great sensitivity, both affording Liu the headspace she needs to deliver a performance of quiet power, selling us on the desperation that drives Irene to the limits of her always practical-minded sanity. By the end of the film, Irene is desperation incarnate — she just wants to be gone and forgotten, and to pull that off while still delivering a hugely dramatic payoff is no mean feat. Liu is on fire right now, and if you have a part as rich and edgy as this to offer her, well, now’s the f*cking time…
Title: RosemeadFestival: Tribeca (U.S. Narrative Competition)Director: Eric LinScreenwriter: Marilyn FuCast: Lucy Liu, Lawrence Shou, Orion Lee, Jennifer Lim, Madison Hu, James ChenSales: W.M.E.Running time: 1 hr 37 mins
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