‘Goodbye June’ Review: Kate Winslet’s Directing Debut for Netflix

Kate Winslet‘s great strength as an actor has always been her authenticity, a groundedness that makes every character she plays sparkle with life. That same quality defines her first film as director, the heart-tugging — a little too heart-tugging — family drama, Goodbye June. Winslet has gathered a dream cast of actors at their absolute best, with Helen Mirren at the center as June, whose large family gathers around her in the hospital in her last days.

Off screen, the film is a different kind of family project, with a screenplay by Winslet’s son, Joe Anders (who is also the son of writer-director Sam Mendes). Most of Anders’ characters and dialogue are impressively realistic, but structurally the film is much weaker. It relies on too many familiar tropes — every family spat is addressed, the misunderstood characters reveal their hidden goodness, the audience’s emotional strings are pulled — and a couple of major characters seem shoehorned in for variety. But the film is lovely in the graceful way it executes its unsurprising content, and the actors make it soar even at its most predictable.

When June, who has terminal cancer, is taken to the hospital, her family rushes to be there. It’s two weeks before Christmas, and the doctors doubt she will make it to the holiday. Piling on the Christmas setting is the kind of emotional cue that is really a bit much, the sort of overload the actors have to compensate for. Among the standouts who do that, Winslet herself plays June’s elegant, successful daughter, Julia, juggling a business career and three young children while her husband works out of town. Andrea Riseborough is a younger daughter, Molly, a financially struggling stay-at-home mother of four, with a husband (Stephen Merchant) who is an endearing scatterbrain.

The sisters can barely stand to be in the same room together and their scenes together are among the film’s strongest, bristling with tension and with dialogue that suggests years of exasperation. Molly explodes in anger when the doctor gives the family June’s terminal diagnosis, while Julia looks stunned and sad, both entirely believable, wrenching reactions.

Johnny Flynn is quietly powerful as their brother, Connor, who still lives with his parents and has the worried, shaggy-haired look of a man who has never quite grown out of adolescence. Flynn lets you feel that the loss of this mother will hit Connor especially hard, forcing him into adulthood. Mirren, as you might expect, is flawless as June. Walking with a stoop in the rare moments when she is out of bed, with thin hair and no makeup, June puts on a brave face with her family and looks devastated in her moments alone.  

But then there are the characters so artificial that even the best actors can’t make them seem real. Toni Collette plays the third sister, Helen, who gets the call about her mother while leading a class in holistic dance therapy and arrives with sage to spread around the hospital room. She is meant to be free-spirited and unconventional, but lands as forced into the film to add a touch of eccentricity that it doesn’t need. Timothy Spall plays their father, who sits in his wife’s hospital room drinking beer, apparently oblivious to how serious the situation is. A late twist for his character is abrupt and thoroughly unconvincing.

The screenplay manipulates the story so that there are many two-character scenes that untangle family relations. You can see them coming and after a while can start ticking off the list of encounters that have to happen before June goes. Julia and Molly get their big scene talking through their fraught relationship. Connor angrily calls out his father’s distant behavior. And among the best, June and Julia have their quiet moment together. Part of your brain can’t help noticing how magical it is to see Mirren and Winslet together at the top of their game, and while that can briefly jolt you out of the fiction of Julia and June, it’s also true that watching all these stars is the main reason to see this supremely well-cast film.

The lesser-known Fisayo Akinade makes a strong impression as the understanding, all-too-perfectly named Angel, a nurse who tells Connor, “I make it my duty to make sure people get good goodbyes.”

Most of the film takes place in June’s hospital room, crowded with her children and seven small grandchildren. Some of the screenplay’s more forced devices — the family hauls in a Christmas tree, the grandchildren stage a Nativity play — seem designed to add color and activity to offset the limitations of a single set. And as director, Winslet does avoid the trap of the film becoming claustrophobic. Her visual style isn’t flashy. It is smooth, effective and unostentatious, as the camera glides in to close-ups on the characters’ faces. In one especially eloquent shot, brief but moving, Mirren lies in the hospital bed at night after the family has left, eyes open in the dark. She is quietly crying, and few actors could have pulled off that scene as well as Mirren, who makes it affecting when it so easily could have been sappy.  

Of course crying is very much a thing this film finally goads the audience to do. How could it not, given the story’s trajectory of inevitable death? But Winslet has created an effective tearjerker with such warmth that you can overlook its predictability. Despite its weaknesses, Goodbye June is an auspicious start for Winslet as a director. And it suggests that Anders has a talent he could use with more invention and originality next time.