Kate Winslet’s feature directing debut is a family movie, scripted by her son Joe Anders; it’s a well-intentioned and starrily cast yuletide heartwarmer, like a two-hour John Lewis Christmas TV ad without the logo at the end. There are one or two nice lines and sharp moments but they are submerged in a treacly soup of sentimentality; in the end, I couldn’t get past the cartoony quasi-Richard Curtis characterisation and the weird not-quite-earthlingness of the people involved. Having said this, I am aware of having been first in the queue to denigrate Winslet’s Christmas film The Holiday, that is regarded by many as one of the most successful films of all time.
Helen Mirren is the June of the title, an affectionate but sharp-tongued matriarch who is diagnosed with terminal cancer in the run-up to Christmas, and her entire quarrelling clan will have to assemble in her hospital room. June, with a kind of benign cunning, realises that she can use her last days as a cathartic crisis that will cure her adult children’s unspoken hurt. They are a stressed careerist (Winslet), a stay-at-home mum (Andrea Riseborough), a hippy-dippy natural birth counsellor (Toni Collette) and a troubled soul (Johnny Flynn), plus all their various kids. There is also June’s daft old husband Bernie, played by Timothy Spall, who likes a drink and can’t talk about his feelings, and whose scatterbrained goofiness has a sad origin. Stephen Merchant plays Riseborough’s lovably useless husband and a gentle hospital nurse, played by Fisayo Akinade, is the ensemble’s self-effacing guide to a wiser future.
It is an impressive cast with everyone giving their considerable all, and in fact Winslet delivers a rather impressively restrained, controlled performance, and perhaps less broad than everyone else’s. She and Riseborough have a big setpiece confrontation scene out in the grim hospital corridor by the chocolate machine and it’s well-managed – you wouldn’t expect anything less with actors of that calibre; it’s better, I think, than the comparable scene between Flynn and Spall, which is resolved in a wordless musical montage. In the end, it is Bernie who realises that time is running out, and some liberties will have to be taken with the calendar if June, on her morphine drip, is to witness the Christmas Day nativity scene that June’s children and grandchildren have promised to put on for her.
There’s nothing wrong with a weepie or big emotional moments, but for me Goodbye June is too unreal, too contrived in its sugary farewell.
Goodbye June is in cinemas from 12 December, and on Netflix from 24 December.
