There’s a moment in “Goodbye June” where Kate Winslet sits in a hospital corridor and says: “If someone asked what this felt like I don’t think I’d be able to describe it, waiting for someone to die.” It’s a relatable thought, because grief — and the anticipation of grief — is overwhelming. Unfortunately describing what this feels like is literally her job, as Winslet both stars in and directs the Christmas-set drama. Her film’s vague understanding of its own situations and characters isn’t sympathetic; it’s a problem.
“Goodbye June,” written by Winslet’s son Joe Anders, is one of many films about saying goodbye to a dying loved one. As is customary, in Hollywood at least, these major life events force every relative to reunite, bury hatchets, and have big beautiful moments that are supposed to comfort and inspire us. Theoretically, anyway.
Kate Winslet stars as Julia, a career mom raising children and barely keeping it together. Andrea Riseborough co-stars as her sister Molly, a stay-at-home mom raising children and barely keeping it together. Johnny Flynn plays their brother Connor, a stay-at-home unemployed guy, apparently, who lives with his parents and is also barely keeping it together. Their other sister, Helen, played by Toni Collette, is a free spirit New Age guru, which the movie seems to think is funny. It’s not, but the movie thinks it is.
Helen Mirren plays their mother, June, who collapses in the first scene and gets rushed to the hospital. She’s dying and there’s nothing the doctors can do but make her comfortable, so everyone in the family rallies around her bedside to have weepy moments and say important-sounding things. Julia and Molly hate each other, but their lifelong divide is easily resolved by a Snickers bar and an anecdote about sandals. Connor’s strained relationship with their father, Bernie, played by Timothy Spall, is resolved over a montage, which probably saved a lot of time in the screenwriting phase.
It’s not that the people in “Goodbye June” don’t have relatable problems. It’s just that, in what may have been a desperate bid to make the film feel universal, their problems are dull. These people don’t have rich inner lives or meaningful backstories, and one gets the distinct impression their futures will be unremarkable, too. The biggest story in their lives is these two weeks when their mom is dying slowly. So that’s all the audience gets to see, and we deserved to see more.
I have no doubt that “Goodbye June” comes from an earnest place, and that Winslet and Anders and every member of the cast put real effort into telling a sweet story. But there’s something off, and I actually can describe it. There’s a shot where a nurse, played by Fisayo Akinade, is carrying June into her bed. The camera is over his shoulder, and the strain hurts her, so that camera moves in close to her face. When her pain subsides, the camera backs off, as if her suffering was the only point of interest.
We’re not here to understand the human condition. “Goodbye June” is just hyperemotional tourism. We’re lookie-loos popping our heads in for the saddest moment in this family’s lives. We don’t even get to know them very well. Some of them we never get to know at all, since half their loved ones apparently feel nothing. Julia and Molly’s husbands spend 99% of the film off-screen. Even their omnipresent kids don’t seem to be processing anything. They don’t even look sad. I know some of them are very young so the gravity probably hasn’t sunk in, but the older kids? Zilch. They’re scheduling conflicts for their parents, not real people.
For a film about strong feelings, it’s hard to have strong feelings about “Goodbye June.” It’s not effective filmmaking but it doesn’t let us down, either, because it never promised much. Watching a parent die slowly isn’t some brand new, unexplored catacomb of dramatic possibilities, and neither Kate Winslet nor Joe Anders go spelunking to find out for sure. It’s a Christmas weepy that doesn’t make you weep, which isn’t much of a tragedy. It isn’t even a bummer. Then again, that’s the problem — if we felt bummed out we would have at least felt something.
“Goodbye June” will be released in select theaters on Dec. 12 before hitting Netflix on Dec. 24.
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