Kate Winslet feels strongly about Christmas — British Christmas, specifically. “That’s a glorious tradition to uphold,” she said recently, including “gorgeous, but sometimes a bit naff, Christmas decorations, and tins of Cadbury’s Roses” chocolates.
The two weeks before Christmas play out in the background of Winslet’s directorial debut, “Goodbye June,” which arrived in U.S. theaters last week and is streaming on Netflix from Wednesday. Amid the twinkly lights and sweet treats, “it’s also a time of year that, for a lot of people, can be incredibly complicated,” Winslet said, “when emotions are unbelievably heightened.”
For the fractured British family at the center of “Goodbye June,” these emotional stakes are cranked higher by the rapid decline of June, the family’s matriarch, after years of cancer treatment. “This is clearly a family who has not been all together for Christmas for a very long time,” Winslet said, and as June’s four adult children gather with their own kids at the hospital, the countdown to Dec. 25 tracks their mother’s final days.
The project has also been a family affair for Winslet. The film’s screenplay was written by her son, Joe Anders, and is partly inspired by the death of Winslet’s mother when Anders was 13, Winslet said.
Anders, now 22, started writing the script two years ago as part of a screenwriting course. When Winslet read an early version, she recalled, she told him that she could help turn it into a movie and would play one of the sisters.
So Anders finished and reworked the script over the course of a year, including moving the drama into a Christmas setting. When it came time to sign up a director, “I just couldn’t let it go,” Winslet said. For a decade, people on sets had been telling her that she should direct, and her son’s script felt like the perfect project: “a first-time writer and a first-time director doing this together as equals, as colleagues,” she said.
They brought together a star-studded cast that most student screenwriters could only dream of, but many of whom Winslet had acted alongside during her four decades in the movie industry: June is played by Helen Mirren; Toni Collette is Helen, her unreliable oldest daughter; Winslet plays the capable and financially generous Julia, who has long been on the outs with her prickly younger sister, Molly (Andrea Riseborough); Johnny Flynn rounds out the quartet of siblings as the anxious, sensitive Connor; and Timothy Spall plays the father.
As the days pass and the family decks out June’s hospital room with more and more Christmas decorations — which the production team sourced from thrift stores so that they felt well used — longstanding frustrations bubble to the surface between Julia and Molly, and between Connor and his father.
For Connor, the bickering sisters, dying mother, incompetent father and backdrop of festive merriment are completely overwhelming, and in the hospital “he’s kind of having a breakdown,” Flynn said.
The actor’s father died from a long-term cancer when Flynn was 18, and “there’s quite a lot of myself in Connor, whereas I’m not always allowed to be that vulnerable in characters that I play,” added Flynn, who was Mr. Knightley in “Emma” and Dickie Greenleaf in “Ripley.”
This made playing Connor feel “very personal,” the actor said, adding that “as painful as it was to hold that space, it was a powerful thing to go through.” Winslet’s approach to directing helped, he added, describing her as “full of compassion for our process.”
When it comes to holiday gatherings, the long-simmering tensions Connor is dealing with don’t match up with the “many images of family togetherness” often portrayed in festive films, according to Lucy Blake, a family psychologist. These picture-perfect expectations, combined with the tendency for family reunions to reignite familiar roles or patterns, can be a “recipe for challenging times,” Blake said by phone.
Riseborough, who plays Molly, said that she saw Christmas as a time “to let go of a lot of old things that you don’t need to be carrying around anymore” while also creating room for the new to arrive, represented in the Christmas story by the birth of Jesus and in “Goodbye June” by the flighty Helen arriving at the hospital pregnant, much to her family’s surprise.
“Goodbye June” captures how “you have some of the most frightening, and some of the most hysterically funny, times during loss,” Riseborough said. (While doctors are telling the family it is time to stop June’s treatment, her husband is preoccupied by a doctor whose name sounds like “Simon Cowell.”)
She added that family in the movie ultimately wants June’s death to be “as funny, as sad, as dignified as you can possibly make it,” in keeping with the poignancy of the festive period.
“Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll come back as snow,” June says as she watches flakes swirl through the night sky outside the hospital window, “and then I’ll see you all at Christmastime.”
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