Film reviews: Goodbye June is a superb ensemble effort
Kate Winslet in Goodbye June
- Goodbye June
- ★★★★☆
- Cinematic release
The classic Christmas movie traditionally celebrates rebirth and hope, but , the directorial debut from Kate Winslet, offers something a little more downbeat.
When the elderly June (Helen Mirren) is hospitalised just before Christmas, her adult children — Julia (Winslet), Molly (Andrea Riseborough), Connor (Johnny Flynn) and Helen (Toni Collette) — immediately rally around, only to learn that June’s cancer has returned and that their mother will be requiring palliative care for the two weeks she has left to live.
The devastating news comes crashing in to fracture the fragile harmony of a group of siblings that seem to exist in a perpetual state of civil war: the struggling Molly resents Julia’s professional success, Julia resents the obligations that come with micro-managing her siblings, Connor is trying to cope with debilitating anxiety, while Helen is a hippy-dippy free spirit whose most fervent wish is to float free of any possible stress.
Meanwhile, June’s husband Bernie (Timothy Spall), who is himself ailing, seems blissfully unaware that his wife is slowly dying.
Having assembled an excellent cast, Winslet wisely gives her actors all the space and time they need to explore the nuances of family frictions (big, small and imagined), as Joe Anders’ script gradually turns the screw on an already delicate family dynamic.
The result, as the clashing personalities bicker and fight, is frequently comic, but it’s also tender and profound as the siblings come to terms, each in their own way, with the impending death of their beloved mother.
It’s a superb ensemble effort, with each character offering a variation on coping with grief as all of June’s children pre-mourn their loss.
While Kate Winslet shines as the eldest sister striving to hold her fracturing family together, it’s as the director of an ambitious and accomplished debut outing that she truly delivers.
- Eleanor the Great
- ★★★★☆
- Cinematic release
stars June Squibb as the eponymous Eleanor, an elderly Jewish woman who is left bereft by the death of her best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar), a Holocaust survivor.
When Eleanor accidentally joins a Holocaust survivor’s group and tells them Bessie’s story, college student and aspiring journalist Nina (Erin Kellyman) assumes that Eleanor is speaking of her own experience.
But as the older and young woman become fast friends, and Erin encourages Eleanor to explore her story, the little white lie begins to spiral out of control …
Written by Tony Kamen and directed by Scarlett Johansson, Eleanor the Great asks some very interesting questions about the nature of truth and the legitimacy of appropriating another’s story so that it might be told.
As is the case with Kate Winslet’s directorial debut, Scarlett Johansson has swung for the fences here, and her ambition is fully repaid by a brilliant performance from June Squibb as the delightfully irascible and mendacious Eleanor, and a story which asserts that ‘deception isn’t always bad if the intention is pure.’
- Ella McCay
- ★★★☆☆
- Cinematic release
Emma Mackey stars as , a deeply moral Lieutenant Governor who has the State governorship thrust upon her when her boss, Bill Moore (Albert Brooks), accepts a Cabinet position in the Obama administration.
The only fly in the ointment is that Ella has previously (and inadvertently) abused her privilege, and must now make some hard decisions about whether to do the right thing and resign, or adopt the more pragmatic political tradition of lying through her teeth in order to achieve all the important policies that are dear to her heart.
Written and directed by Albert Brooks, this is a charming political fable with Emma Mackey in terrific form.
Unfortunately, Brooks’ script frequently trips over itself as it attempts to shoehorn in too many sub-plots, and particularly Ella’s fraught relationships with her philandering father Eddie (Woody Harrelson) and her loose cannon of a husband, Ryan (Jack Lowden).
