Kate Winslet’s directorial debut has a stellar cast, but the earnest writing struggles to move beyond cliché
This clichéd tale of festive family dysfunction might just be the ultimate nepo baby film. The writer is Joe Anders, son of Kate Winslet (and her ex-husband, the director Sam Mendes). Winslet herself stars, as well as directing for the first time, and producing too.
Even though Goodbye June has some moving performances from an ensemble cast so packed with British greats that it rivals Love Actually, it’s hard to imagine a screenplay this thin would have been made in the first place without the star power driving it.
It’s an earnestly written tale that leans into well-worn family dynamics we’ve seen many times before in films such as The Family Stone. Helen Mirren plays the likeable no-nonsense matriarch June, whose cancer has placed her in a hospice for what looks to be her last Christmas.
She is surrounded by her warring adult children: uptight girlboss Julia (Winslet), fed up soccer mum Molly (Andrea Riseborough), forlorn manchild Connor (Johnny Flynn) and pregnant hippie Helen (Toni Colette), as well as their clueless father Bernie (Timothy Spall), who mumbles his way through pints of Guinness and packets of pork scratchings barely seeming to register his wife’s demise.
All the children disagree over how to care for their dying mum, much to the chagrin of the improbably patient Nurse Angel (Fisayo Akinade). Julia and Molly, who haven’t spoken for several years, even draw up a visiting rota where they don’t overlap to avoid seeing each other entirely.
You can probably guess what ultimately happens between Type A Julia and frazzled Molly, and that’s because everything that happens in this story is predictable, each character written with little more depth than a John Lewis Christmas ad. The siblings seem to have fallen out for no greater reason than a basic personality clash and Anders never really attempts to probe further.
The father’s appallingly unhelpful behaviour is forgiven the moment the kids get a glimpse of his inner suffering. It’s the sort of thing that happens in, well, films, rather than real life. An early scene involving the extended use of a landline telephone, in a household where surely no one really has one anymore, is indicative of a film that sometimes feels like a rather good am-dram project, rather than a professional undertaking.
That said, somewhere between Winslet’s unsentimental direction (the camera never lingers, the story moves along briskly) and the tremendous cast’s ability to imbue underwritten characters with depth and emotion, moments of exceptional tenderness emerge. The fights between Julia and Molly do have the ring of authenticity, even if the script doesn’t quite merit it. In one particularly lovely scene, Connor watches a terminally ill man fulfilling his travel bucket-list via a VR headset provided by the hospice, and the wordless awe for the staff’s kind-heartedness and the invalid’s 11th-hour joie de vivre visible on Flynn’s face is exquisite.
Mirren too is particularly good throughout, refusing to play the acquiescent patient and providing flashes of dark humour to cut through the schmaltz (“Gimme some mascara. I’ve never died before, I want to look nice when it happens”).
Goodbye June is preoccupied with sentiment in a way that might feel great for a two-minute Christmas ad, but just doesn’t work for an entire film. Still, Winslet is a confident director and Anders has an eye for relationships. He does, I suspect, have more to offer, but perhaps should, like most rookie screenwriters, have been left alone to brew his talent a little longer.
In cinemas now, and on Netflix from 24 December
