'Goodbye June' review: Kate Winslet's directorial debut is flat when it should be compelling

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Kate Winslet makes her directorial debut in "Goodbye June," bringing a screenplay by her son Joe Anders to the screen. It's a small-scale family drama, set around Christmas, and focused on how the four children of matriarch June (Helen Mirren) cope at the end of her cancer battle.

Characters include daughters Helen (Toni Collette), Julia (Winslet) and Molly (Andrea Riseborough), and son Connor (Johnny Flynn). There's also their father and June's husband, Bernie (Timothy Spall), and plenty of grandchildren.

As the family gathers in June's hospital room, old wounds get reopened and memories rekindle. 

MY SAY Winslet shows herself to be an adept director of actors in her first stint behind the camera. She elicits performances that fit the naturalistic sensibility underpinning the movie, an approach calibrated to avoid anything that might seem too manufactured or overwrought.

It obviously helps a great deal when you can just call Helen Mirren or Toni Collette and sign them up for your project. There's not a false moment when it comes to these characters and their portrayal.

So it gives us no pleasure to acknowledge that the movie still never really works, in large part because Winslet and Anders are so committed to keeping "Goodbye June" grounded and real that they fail to give the audience a reason to care about it.

There's a lot to be said for making a movie that's utterly committed to authenticity. Anyone who has been through anything like this with a loved one will recognize quite a bit of "Goodbye June."

But we don't go to the movies just to see our own lives reflected back to us. We need drama, we need conflict, whether it's overt or subtle. We need someone to do or say something wrong and to have to face the consequences of their actions. 

These folks are all so nice and normal — that's even true of the "offbeat" daughter, Collette's Helen, a holistic dance therapy instructor — that they're just not very interesting. The conflicts that emerge between them are the sort of run-of-the-mill issues that define most families, including some raw memories and the like.

Mirren's June might make the occasional comment about Helen not looking good in yellow, or whatever, but she's otherwise pretty much a saint. Bernie gets yelled at by Connor for processing his wife's mortality a bit differently than his kids, through drinking and shutting down emotionally. But we all grieve in different ways. This isn't exactly villainous stuff.

There's also nothing particularly cinematic about any of it. The visuals are flat and drab. They don't tell much of a story. Winslet never finds a way to elevate the material. So the emotional impact of it all is muted at best.

You keep waiting for the movie to give the audience something, anything, to shake us out of our stupor. But that something never arrives. 

BOTTOM LINE "Goodbye June" has some fine qualities, but it's flat when it should be compelling.