Review: Rosemead — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Rosemead

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: R

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

Stars: Lucy Liu, Lawrence Shou

Writers: Marilyn Fu, Eric Lin

Director: Eric Lin

Do not be fooled by the lobby poster for Rosemead, the powerful story of a desperately ill mother striving to cope with her severely schizophrenic teenage son.

Yes, this moment of familial joy — the two on Venice Beach, laughing uproariously, embracing in the surf — does occur in the film. But be advised that shot represents the single split-second moment when anyone smiles, or experiences even a fleeting second of happiness, in this skillfully crafted — if determinedly grim — family drama.

Lucy Liu — known primarily as the kick-butt action star of Kill Bill and Charlie’s Angels — stars as Irene, a widow who lives with her teenage son Joe (Lawrence Shou) in the Chinese-American enclave of Rosemead, California. The fact that she is dying of cancer weighs heavily on Irene, but the inevitable procession of life and death is one that she, and fellow members of her community, can at least understand.

Mental illness, however, is another matter. Sinking into his increasingly frequent delusions, Joe has morphed from a star student and champion high school swimmer to an unpredictable, sometimes dangerous jangle of nerves. He has weekly appointments with a local mental health professional, but Irene — influenced by old-school friends who insist Joe’s real problem is most likely spirit possession — almost never sits in, despite pleading from the doctor. When Irene asks Joe if he’s taking his medication, she never really follows up to confirm his testy insistence that he is. Even when she discovers that Joe has been obsessing online about mass school shootings, Irene stubbornly discerns this is a problem that needs to be kept in the family.

This delicately deceptive balance can’t go on for long, though: Thus far, as Joe’s mother and legal guardian, she’s been able to absorb responsibility for his illness-driven misbehavior as he wrecks school property and wanders disoriented through the streets of Rosemead. But Joe is about to turn 18, and as a concerned social worker explains to her, at that point his next offense will result in jail at worst, and an overcrowded mental institution at best.

Inevitably, Irene and Joe embark on a deadly dance of willing mutual deception: He doesn’t tell her of his deepening psychosis while she closes her eyes to the obvious; she keeps her terminal illness a secret from him while he ignores her obviously failing health. From the start, it’s clear these two are, to paraphrase Soul Asylum, barreling the wrong way down a one-way track.

First-time director and co-writer Eric Lin has little latitude when it comes to steering mother and son through a happier course, since Rosemead is based on a grim Los Angeles Times article that explored the challenges of providing mental health care within insular communities like the one in Rosemead. Of course, when it comes to mental illness, denial is by no means unique to the Chinese-American community; Lin offers this particular story as a cautionary tale of turning away on either a personal or community-wide basis.

Liu gives a devastating performance, seeming to physically shrink as Irene’s cancer and concerns conspire to rob her of literally everything she holds dear. Her Irene infuriates us with her stubborn insistence that only she can resolve this deepening crisis, but we nevertheless hope against hope she will, against insurmountable odds, find a way through. As Joe, newcomer Lawrence Shou navigates the difficult waters of keeping the viewer’s sympathy while sinking into a pattern of ever deeper antisocial behavior.

From its first moments, Rosemead instills a nagging sense of discomfort that never lets up — and that is by design. Our neighborhoods and schools and workplaces, Rosemead reminds us, are populated with proud humans suffering subterranean desperation, people who would be mortified to know anyone else was aware of it.

Our responsibility is to help them. Theirs is to let the rest of us know they need help.