Terminal illness, estranged adult siblings and hospital rooms are certainly not going to be everyone’s cup of tea around the holidays, but you probably already know by this point whether this is an experience you want to sign up for. It remains a mystery why so many holiday movies feel the need to include a dying mother. Perhaps it’s because, from an emotional standpoint, it rarely misses.
Unlike, say The Family Stone however, Goodbye June actually places the audience in that most unpleasant of settings: The hospital. It begins with a nightmare scenario, with the elderly mother, June (Helen Mirren) collapsing as the kettle cries out on the stove. Her grown son Connor (Johnny Flynn) finds her, collects his father Bernie (Timothy Spall), and they race off to the hospital, forgetting to turn off the tap in the sink before they leave. Goodbye June has an eye for the mundane details that make up everyday life that all seem so small in the face of loss.
Soon, they’re greeted by the rest of June and Bernie’s daughters, Julia (Winslet), a successful, busy and exhausted mom of three; Molly (Andrea Riseborough), a hippie mom of many who resents Julia and can’t accept that her mother is dying; and Helen (Toni Collette), who likes crystals. The four grown children are wildly unprepared to deal with their mother’s decline. Molly, perhaps the most baffling character, shoos away the palliative care workers, insisting on taking June home immediately.
