You would think that the chances of a movie directed by Kate Winslet from a script written by her son, when he was 19, turning out to be any good would be close to zero. Christmas is, however, a time for miracles, and Goodbye June, which Winslet also stars in, from a script by Joe Anders, her son with Sam Mendes, is a little Christmas miracle. It’s a wonderfully raw, moving and funny film about sibling niggles and family heartbreak, filled with biting humour, button-sized observation, noisy kids, frayed tempers and armpit farts. In short, a perfect movie to watch with your family as you contemplate the looming festivities.
Winslet plays Julia, one of a quartet of siblings, the others being: Molly (Andrea Riseborough), who is struggling to raise her four children in an organic, toxin-free environment; Helen (Toni Collette), a crystal-loving new age hippy; and the sensitive Connor (Johnny Flynn), who wears Oxfam sweaters seemingly left over from the 1990s, and who has been the main carer for their elderly mum, June (Helen Mirren).
When June receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, this fractious brood must bury their differences and come together as best they can. “Advanced care?” Molly says when confronted with two smiling palliative care nurses in over-cheerful Christmas jumpers. “What is she advancing to?” Julia’s response is even more succinct. “Bagsy not tell Helen that Mum is dying.”
At first glance you think the film is your standard-issue four-ply-Kleenex weepie, but there’s nothing standard about the screenplay. Anders began it when he was just 19 and studying at the National Film and Television School, which is nothing short of astonishing: the writing has all the wisdom and knotty particularity of a writer three times his age.
Winslet directing on the set of Goodbye June
KIMBERLEY FRENCH/NETFLIX
He’s got an amazing ear and eye for the ridges of resentment that crisscross family life — and the emotion they keep at bay. Molly and Julia haven’t spoken in years and must devise a visiting schedule that doesn’t bring them face to face. There is also lurking tension between Connor and the siblings’ apparently useless dad (Timothy Spall), who takes June’s diagnosis as an opportunity to make bad jokes, drink beer and watch football in June’s hospital room. “There is not a better culinary pairing than a pint of Guinness and pork scratchings,” he pontificates.
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All of this rings wonderfully true, as does the fact that the dying June is the calmest of the lot of this argumentative, heartbroken lot. “You don’t mind that I’m dying, do you?” she asks Julia calmly, at one point, as if she were leaving her in the lurch or splitting from a party too early. “All this is unimportant,” says the angelic nurse Angel (Fisayo Akinade) of their squabbles, compared with “making sure people get a good goodbye”.
Does the film lay on too good of a goodbye for June? Probably. People rarely die on a convenient schedule, but while you are off buying cat food. June gets a full court send-off plus a Nativity play. But the screenplay has an extraordinary ability to unlock emotion with the most mundane of events: looking back at my notes for a scene that had me gulping back tears, all I could read were the words “Snickers bar × 2”.
★★★★☆
15, 114min
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Sporting a sweeping long fringe, an elegant, figure-hugging tartan suit, and the same Kentucky fried accent he has used for previous performances as the detective Benoit Blanc, Daniel Craig seems to be having even more illicit fun than usual in Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. This time he rolls up at a distant parish to investigate the death of a domineering priest, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin).
Keeling over in a locked closet with a knife in his back, Wicks makes for a “textbook example of a perfectly impossible crime”, Blanc says, referencing Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue and John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man to show he knows his stuff. Possibly, although if there’s a crime to be solved it’s the theft of the film, from under Craig’s nose, by Josh O’Connor’s conflicted young priest, who has past sins of his own to atone for and who quickly becomes the main suspect.
O’Connor’s obvious sincerity — and innocence — may indeed by the biggest problem for the film, which fingers the usual array of possible suspects among Wicks’s beleaguered flock, without any coming into the kind of vivid relief that the conniving Thrombey clan did in the first film. This despite a cast that includes Andrew Scott, Jeremy Renner, Cailee Spaeny and Thomas Haden Church.
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Johnson’s ludic instincts remain undiminished as he lays on what the local police captain calls “some serious Scooby-Doo shit” as well as one of Blanc’s usual, climactic “checkmate moments” where he explains how everything went down in barnstorming detail.
It’s all so clever that half an hour after the film is over you won’t remember a stitch of it. What stays with you is O’Connor taking time out from a bit of sleuthing to take confession from a member of his parish. He’s a little like Ana de Armas’s pure-hearted nurse in the first film. Johnson may be in league with the devils on our shoulders, but he’s secretly in love with the angels.
★★★☆☆
12A, 144min
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