A blunt-speaking matriarch’s rapid decline in palliative care over a series of December days may not sound like the last word in festive viewing, but that is where this debut directorial effort from Kate Winslet takes us with almost indecent jolliness. It’s an advent calendar with a dose of morphine and a forced smile behind every window, a stark-yet-saccharine affair that sells out its own attempts at pathos with thin characters and jokes about goose-ducken. Only a cast of elite thesps keeps it from sinking into ignominy.
With the Lee actress directing from a screenplay written by her 21-year-old son Joe Anders, the Winslet family is clearly a lot more in tune with its emotions than the film’s angsty Gloucester clan. Helen Mirren is June, the vinegary but loving mum to three wildly different daughters: buttoned-up success story Julia (Winslet); stressed-out mum Molly (Andrea Riseborough), whose dotty husband (Stephen Merchant) is driving her to the brink; and New Age whirlwind Helen (Toni Collette). Even closer to home are distracted husband Bernie (Timothy Spall), avoidant in the face of this looming and seismic loss, and heavy-laden son Connor (Johnny Flynn), who finds both panic and purpose in his mother’s latest, and possibly final, collapse.
The waxen June and her family decamp to an empty fairy-tale hospital given a romcom glow by cinematographer Alwin H Küchler (Steve Jobs) to arrange care rotas and relitigate old grudges, while the boisterous grandkids prep the mise en scène for their nativity play.
Even in a fug of painkillers, June remains the family’s axis, giving it one last go at mediating between Julia and Molly before she’s gone and it’s too late. The feud seems to have been ignited by the latter’s jealousy of her more successful sister, but these characters are a lightly sketched bunch.
These characters are a lightly sketched bunch
Goodbye June attempts to weave together Richard Curtis’s festive hygge and the domestic abrasion of a Mike Leigh film, but ends up falling between those distant poles. Cancer and grief just don’t lend themselves to the neat ribbons Anders’ script ties on every thorny dynamic here, for all the best efforts of the gifted and game cast. And it jars to see palliative care work reduced to the butt of sitcom jokes.
June’s ever-present nurse (Fisayo Akinade) is called Angel, either a nod to It’s a Wonderful Life or a suggestion that divine intervention is what’s needed in these bleak situations. Anyone who’s been in those hospital rooms knows how far from the truth that is.
In select cinemas Dec 12. On Netflix worldwide Dec 24.