Goodbye June review – Kate Winslet’s warm Christmas advert looks like a two-hour John Lewis advert | film

yourEight Winslet’s directorial debut is a family film written by her son, Joe Anders; It’s a well-intentioned, star-studded film, like a two-hour John Lewis Christmas TV ad without the tagline at the end. There are one or two nice lines and intense moments, but they are bathed in a deceptive soup of emotion; Ultimately, I couldn’t get past the almost cartoonish characterization of Richard Curtis and the strange, completely unearthly personality of the people involved. Having said that, I realize that I was first in line to discredit Winslet’s Christmas film “Holiday,” which many consider to be one of the most successful films of all time.

Helen Mirren is the June of the title, a caring but sharp-tongued mother who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer in the run-up to Christmas, and whose entire feuding clan will have to gather in her hospital room. June realizes, with a kind of benign cunning, that she can use her final days as a healing crisis that will heal the unspoken hurt of her adult children. They’re an uptight professional (Winslet), a stay-at-home mom (Andrea Riseborough), a hippie natural birth counselor (Toni Collette), and a troubled soul (Johnny Flynn), plus all their different children. There’s also John’s silly old husband Bernie, played by Timothy Spall, who likes to drink and can’t talk about his feelings, and whose scatterbrained idiocy has its origins in melancholy. Stephen Merchant plays Riseborough’s lovestruck, useless husband and the kindly hospital nurse, played by Fisayo Akinade, is the band’s self-guided guide to a wiser future.

It’s an impressive cast with everyone giving it their all, and Winslet actually gives an impressively measured and controlled performance, perhaps less expansive than anyone else’s. She and Riseborough have a big confrontation scene in the dreary hospital corridor next to the chocolate machine and it’s well-staged – you wouldn’t expect anything less with a cast of this calibre; I think it’s better than the similar scene between Flynn and Spall, which was resolved in a silent music montage. In the end, it’s Bernie who realizes 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 scene on Christmas Day that June’s children and grandchildren have promised to set for her.

There’s nothing wrong with crying or big emotional moments, but for me Goodbye June is a very unrealistic film, and very contrived in its sweet farewell.