Goodbye June

[VoR]

AKA the film Kate Winslet directed which was written by her teenage son but is absolutely not a vanity nepo baby project.



To be fair, maybe it was watching it while feeling a bit tired and emotional yesterday, but it's not terrible. Definitely elevated by the cast and the direction, with Winslet and Mirren the clear standouts.

It definitely had the feel of a first script though as a lot of it felt very basic and surface level.

Much as I love her, Toni Collette's character was so cartoonish she felt like she was in an entirely different movie. She could also have been lifted right out, her character didn't really contribute much. The sibling who left the country and isn't as enmeshed with the rest of the family could have been an interesting plot strand, but they never really explored it.

Andrea Risebourgh playing an absolute cunt was quite compelling, until midway through the film that aspect of her personality was just dropped entirely for reasons that, if anything, made her character seem even less sympathetic than she'd been before.
The fact that the saintly, magically on duty 24-7 nurse was literally called ANGEL

Spoiler: Spoiler quibbles

I actually LOL'd when said NURSE ANGEL ended up getting together with the sad sack brother

POOR Helen Mirren being forced to die during a horrible production of the nativity story.

All that being said it did have a couple of really nice/poignant moments that cut through the general earnestness of it all, and at times it did do a decent job of capturing the feeling of waiting for a loved one to die in hospital - albiet a very accommodating hospital with seemingly no other patients and nurses who have time to spend their shifts sitting in the chapel dispensing pearls of wisdom to sad family members.

I'm sure Kate will direct better movies, and her son will probably write better ones too.

 

[floppet]

I watched a few days ago and, whilst it was enough to kill time, it's a very bare film with not much of a storyline. Maybe they thought the stellar actresses and Tim Spall would carry it, they were the main reason I decided to watch it, but they aren't enough to cover all the glaring inaccuracies and sentimental poppycock. There were no deep emotional reveals about why the siblings were as dysfunctional as they were, no explanations, and then the two sisters sat in the corridor for 5 minutes, had a little cry and became best friends and everything was all right in the world again.

VoR's explanation of it being a child's story explained everything that was wrong with it for me.