Kate Winslet’s new Netflix Christmas film will move you deeply

There is no perfect farewell to someone we love. We can come up with a thousand and one scenarios for how it should look, but somewhere between hospital beds, stumbling through corridors in tears, arguments with the closest members of the family as well as with doctors, it will in the end (literally at the end) always be awful. Above all, because no one can ever prepare you, not even yourself, for that collapse. No matter how old you are, you do not have enough physical or emotional capacity not to crash to the edge of despair, not to say meaninglessness, when you realize that someone who is yours has left you forever (even though you never truly grasp that completely, or rather, never fully accept it, in order to survive yourself). With her new Netflix film Goodbye, June, which is also her directorial debut, based on a script by her son Joe Anders, Kate Winslet speaks precisely about this, bringing together an excellent cast.

Helen Mirren plays June, the caring but sharp-witted and slightly caustic head of the family who is diagnosed with terminal cancer just before Christmas. She accepts her fate stoically, with a hint of denial, while her distracted husband Bernie (Timothy Spall) barely shows any reaction. Their four children, however, respond as any of us would, with shock, accusations, despair, and arguments. There is the careerist (Kate Winslet), the housewife (Andrea Riseborough), the delusional yoga instructor (Toni Collette), and the troubled soul (Johnny Flynn), as well as numerous grandchildren. As they gather in a hospital room that becomes like their second home, and this just before Christmas, June realizes with a measure of benevolent cunning that she can use her final days to heal the unspoken wounds of her adult children.

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There is no dramatic plot, twists, or climax. The film lives in its atmosphere. Conversations are interrupted by trips to the bathroom, blood pressure checks, morphine infusions, and battles with the hospital television, and beneath the relaxed and often humorous moments runs an inevitable sadness. Kate Winslet respects this without excess, finding the right balance of gloom, comfort, and forced cheerfulness. A glimmer of light is each additional day spent with the mother, even her mornings, gazing out the window, a child’s squeeze of the hand, reading a book, and the almost sentimental warmth that radiates from every frame.

It is obvious that this could not be conveyed so convincingly on screen by someone who has not been through it. In 2017, Kate lost her mother, Sally Bridges-Winslet. It was, as her youngest daughter says, “as if the North Star suddenly fell from the sky.” Today, she believes everything would have been even harder if the family had not grown closer at that time. “I have an enormous amount of peace and acceptance about what happened precisely because we managed to make that time for her what it was. It was significant to see how much love poured into that moment. Also, no matter how much I tried to separate my own experience from that of this fictional family, it was almost impossible. At times I felt as if I were reliving parts of my mother’s passing that I never had the chance to witness. So guiding the actors with tenderness, while not falling apart myself in some corner, was certainly a great challenge.”

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It also reminded me that all happy families resemble one another, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The cast possesses a convincing humanity, which makes it feel real and close. We can all identify when one sister accuses another of always having had to be the family’s support, or with the brother who is stuck in life yet a withdrawn peacemaker, who at one point even manages to jolt the father and bring him back to reality. In that sense, the film certainly wants to tell us that none of these family currents are immutable, especially in the face of the merciless language of death.

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Whether through the presence of children in the hospital or through the finale with an improvised Christmas play, Goodbye, June juxtaposes youth and old age, birth and death, in a way that feels at once joyful and heartbreakingly true, just like life. In the end, this is not a story in which one should expect last-minute miracles, which is why it will certainly not become a Christmas classic, but regardless of that, it speaks of much more: priorities, nurturing relationships with loved ones, and family unity as an important shield against the tragedies that life inevitably brings.