★★ (2 out of 4)
Tearjerkers are coming out of the floorboards this holiday season. And Netflix has a doozy in “Goodbye June,” starring Kate Winslet in her blah directing debut. The Oscar and Emmy winner didn’t write the script. She left that to Joe Anders, the 22-year-old newbie who happens to be her son with director Sam Mendes. I suppose we should be grateful that this is no nepo baby nightmare, like “Anemone,” the sodden paternal project that Daniel Day Lewis did with his son Ronan. “Goodbye June” is not great either, far from it, but it runs the gamut from A to B without making audiences smack their foreheads while screaming, WTF.
Clever Winslet doesn’t play June. She casts that major if thankless role with acting royalty, Dame Helen Mirren, who could carry even a feeble, fractured script to the finish line on the strength of her gifts for humor and heart. Cancer-ridden June, as if you couldn’t guess from the “goodbye” in the title, is dying. But she doesn’t go around whining about it. In her first and last upright scene, June is rushed to the hospital by her husband Bernie (Timothy Spall) and will lay in bed, smiling patiently and issuing comforting homilies while waiting to die before Christmas.
Wasting A-listers on well-meaning drivel like this is less a crime than a misdemeanor for which audiences will do the time.
“Goodbye June” is a domestic drama, with lots of roles for family members who gather bedside. There’s jobless son Connor (a weightless Johnny Flynn) and his three sisters. It’s a Chekhov reference that doesn’t carry along to the writing here, which is more Royal Academy of Daytime Drama.
Anyway, Winslet gives herself the least showy (read dullest) role as Julia, the accomplished middle daughter who’s sane to a fault. Toni Collette is the eldest as Helen, a loony New Ager whose manic energy makes people nervous, or maybe it’s just me. Andrea Riseborough is Molly, the youngest, a controlling wife and mother who seems to have memorized the manual on how to be a mean girl. Regina George would blanch at her bitchiness.
And, wait, we’re not done. Besides assorted doctors and nurses—the kindest of whom is subtly named Angel and played with a temperament to match by Fisayo Akinade—there are grandchildren who put on a Christmas pageant for granny that Winslet—I’ll never forgive her for this—forces us all to watch. My sympathies are with grandad (Spall is relatable in anything, especially here as boozer who finds his escape from his brood in the bottle.).
Wasting A-listers on well-meaning drivel like this is less a crime than a misdemeanor for which audiences will do the time. The story certainly comes from a sincere place. Anders wrote the script partly based on Winslet's personal experience with the loss of her mother to ovarian cancer in 2017. In school, Anders had been encouraged to write about “something that he knew.”
It’s impossible to doubt the sincerity of intent in “Goodbye June,” though the execution of the material leaves much to be desired. Done with artistry by, say, Azazel Jacobs in “My Three Daughters,” the theme can yield something touching and vital. The good intentions that pave the road to “Goodbye June” don’t lead to hell, just an unrealized vision that makes us think of the film that might have been, one where harsh truths break free from a blanket of bland.